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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26200765">Frostbite</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/CptRedder/pseuds/CptRedder'>CptRedder</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Marked For Death (Video Game)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ghosts, POV First Person, Psychological Horror, Readable without familiarity of source material, Spirits, Unreliable Narrator</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-04-13</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 07:21:31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>46,754</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26200765</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/CptRedder/pseuds/CptRedder</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The massacre of his village, a supposed suicide attempt, and a hell-gate-sealing job: these are what led to the silence of Milan's best friend.</p><p>Once a proud pursuer of his heroic dreams, the Warrior Milan grew up an orphan and a scapegoat. He idolized his dead and dishonorable parents, who failed to protect the last Oracle from Divine Knights. Being one of the last four survivors of the Medius Dragonblood Village massacre, he travels the land of Remlia, telling the stories of his past life and bitterly serving the people who hate him—until the Empress suddenly turns silent and emotionless. Quickly, the events snowball into a trail of past fears that the orphan Warrior had been storing up since childhood—and perhaps his karma is catching up to him now.</p><p>Disclaimer:<br/>Dragon Marked For Death and all of its characters, locations, etc. belong to Inti Creates. The characters featured in this story are derivative characters.</p><p>Content Warnings for graphic depictions of violence, references to suicide and self-harm, and rape. [M Rating]</p><p>--------------------------------------------------</p><p>For Max and Tron.<br/>Thank you for everything.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>As of 12 April 2021, Frostbite has been unlocked, almost every single chapter has been updated for better flow and some new content, and two new chapters have been written (Pt. 10 and Pt. 17). The story is still ongoing, 20 chapters will likely no longer be the estimated total, and I am not sure when it will be completed yet. But it has been this long, and I've worked hard, so thank you very much for reading!</p><p>//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//</p><p>As of 11 March 2021, Frostbite has been locked to Ao3 members only for a major overhaul.</p><p>//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//</p><p>As of 9 February 2021, Frostbite is set for revisions for all chapters in regards to sentence flow, transitional fixes, etc. Another update will be posted when that is completed. Thank you for reading.</p><p>//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//--//</p><p>As of 30 August 2020, Frostbite is about 75% complete. I will be posting the first 15 chapters early because I am going to be busy the next few months, and I am unsure yet if I will finish Frostbite during that time.</p><p>I hope you will all enjoy my work over the past year and a half.</p>
    </blockquote><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>
  
</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It was supposed to be the day of the winter festival when the Empress got her scar. It didn’t take long for her to get it, no. It was a quick, clean strike, a diagonal line from the top of her left eye to the right of her mouth. She staggered back when she got it, stopped choking the Shinobi in the middle of the river where the great waterfalls around us amassed into pools of deep red. The color came from the blood of the fallen Dragonblood Clan. The same color dripped from her fresh scar. And the same color dripped onto the Shinobi’s pale face, his face almost as white as our hair, as he pushed her off him.</p><p>In my left hand was the small wooden box with a flower engraved on the cover. In my right hand was the shoulder of a girl about half my height, looking like one of my now-dead orphanage sisters. She was holding a wand and holding me and I was making sure she had her eyes closed from what was happening. I didn’t want to look, but I had to. It was the only way to ignore all the other dead bodies around us.</p><p>Where the Empress fell, she knocked over one of the incense flasks placed in front of the gravestones of my parents. The glass shattered and the blood on her hand with her engagement ring smeared on the parts of the gravestones that read, “The Warriors of the Clan.” Shaking and backing up, the Shinobi dropped his bloodstained kunai into the water.</p><p>A big splash. Mucky red soaked her dress, and dirt marred her face. She hadn’t been this dirty since she was an eight-year-old walking barefoot on the riverbanks, playing stick-fight and drawing pictures of Ogres and Goblins in the dirt with me and the other kids. She hadn’t been this dirty since before her late fiancé came to live in the village permanently.</p><p>When her head hit the broken slab of rock from the Astral Dragon monument behind her, a voice called out from deep within the Den, hidden between two of the mighty waterfalls and two towering red-and-black, moss-covered dragon statues. Everyone stopped moving while the waterfalls kept flowing. The low, hollow voice echoed, “Children of Our own blood, you desire power… vengeance.”</p><p>Me, I desired for my brothers and sisters to come back to life. I imagined the Witch being one of them, even though I’ve never seen her before.</p><p>As our deity, as the Astral Dragon Atruum spoke, I expected myself to pray and say thank you, thank you, over and over in my mind. Thank you for making sure the Empress didn’t kill an innocent person like what the Divine Knights did to everyone else. Thank you for making sure the Witch didn’t end up crushed under the rubble like my siblings in the orphanage. Thank you for not killing the Shinobi the same way I saw the Empress’s fiancé with his face smashed under a rock on the bridge leading into the village. This fiancé, Angelo, he still had the unwilting white rose in his hand when the Empress arrived, and she was carrying the small wooden box, a present for their marriage. He had trample marks and bruises over his arms and legs.</p><p>“We have abandoned power and war,” Atruum said, “and yet there are those who would pursue us.”</p><p>On the ground, the Empress, she started rocking back and forth and grasping her stomach. Like she had a stomachache. She laid down on her side and started spasming and biting down on her lip.</p><p>From the suspension bridges connecting us to the rest of Remlia, to the heart of our isolated village, footprints in the hard dirt trailed back and forth, layered on top of each other, armies of shallow holes eroding the land we used to call our home. There were so many that it was hard to tell which way they went—which ones came in, and which ones never came out. The footprints trailed into the foundations of broken, burning houses. The dark smoke rose high enough that one could see it from five villages, forests and forests, away.</p><p>The orphanage, the last place where I saw the orphanage director and all of my brothers and sisters, the old lady’s shattered glasses on the floor, toys scattered about, bloodstained, little hands and feet and arms all cut off, all of them now dead, dead, dead, somehow, the black smoke bloomed and rose the highest from there. The smoke rose even higher than the largest statue of the village, the smoke, black and ugly, clumped up together like a rotten heart I could reach out and crush with my bare hands, then store away forever.</p><p>The hardest thing to look at on a dead body is the face. It’s like their souls got sucked right out of them, leaving them no opportunity to say farewell. But it’s also like they’re still there. Like they should be alive. And all we saw was mangled body after mangled body, soulless face after soulless face. The clothes of the fallen had deep cuts and burns that only a Divine Knight’s sword could make. Even Angelo’s.</p><p>“There are those who use power to enforce tyranny,” Atruum said. “They now force Us to let Our power be known once more.”</p><p>The Astral Dragon sounded a lot like my dead father. At least, he sounded like the few moments I’ve heard his voice when I was a baby. I don’t think he ever talked like him, though, at least I hope.</p><p>Ever since the Empress and I stepped foot into the smoldering village, just like the footprints, dead bodies with their once-brilliant white hair now stained with red laid silent all over. Most of these people weren’t even Warriors. Most of them dressed humbly with light brown or black rags, some with the adornments of our now-dead Dragonblood style, golden lines now red, carrying baskets or fishing rods or books or nothing, and then they got killed. Most of them laid face-down. Most of them had been running.</p><p>The Warriors, those few men and women who offered to protect our peaceful village, blessed by body paint that never saved them in the end, they were all put into rows and rows in front of the smaller Astral Dragon monuments scattered about. And then they were all beheaded. The headless body of the Chief—the Empress’s father—laid at the end.</p><p>Seeing all of them out like that, knowing I had the same permanent Warrior paint on my body, I should’ve been dead with them. I shouldn’t be alive.</p><p>I was looking at the Empress on the ground and the Shinobi frozen and trembling, and below me, the Witch started sobbing, loud. Her opaque goggles clouded up with mist and teardrops.</p><p>Both of my hands were covered in wet blood from me checking if anyone was still alive. Whether the blood came from my dead siblings or Angelo, I couldn’t tell. My left hand somehow never stained the small wooden box red, while my right hand left streaks of finger-shaped blood on the Witch’s back.</p><p>In truth, we didn’t look that different from the dead bodies. Our own selves—the Empress’s dress, the Shinobi’s lightweight uniform, the Witch’s heavy robes, the blue paint on my bare chest and waist—none of us were exempt from the bloodstain.</p><p>No rose was gonna save us here.</p><p>With my bloodied fingers, I traced the heat blowing up from the bridge of my nose into a bloody, bloody X-shape burnt into my face. A new, final remnant of the blue war paint will replace it, a brand of ownership for the deity I forged my pact with. A seal over my spilled blood of that day.</p><p>Angelo, he no longer had his angel face from back when I first met him, from back when I returned from the Warrior rites at twelve years old to see him and the Empress together on her tenth birthday, eight years ago. It was the first time in public I saw her wear a traditional Dragonblood dress. Before that, she used to wear soiled robes and no shoes whenever I saw her by the riverbank with a stick in her hand, scratching pictures of monsters and swords and claws in the ground. She used to trick the Chief into letting her come along with me whenever I went fishing for the orphanage. That was what I was doing right before I crossed the bridge.</p><p>Right then, with the state that the Empress was in, she and the rest of us looked worse than however the two of us used to look down by the riverbank playing stick fight.</p><p>“So shall it be engraved upon the Divine Family themselves,” Atruum said, “who dare to rob the Clan of their lives!”</p><p>The hardest thing to look at on a dead body is the face.</p><p>The Empress didn’t get to see his.</p><p>I thought it was for the best.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>This isn’t the same story I tell to the folks at the bar, though. Like what I’d do with the orphanage kids, of course I have to censor the dead bodies and the Empress getting her scar and what Atruum told us to do. But at least all the folks are too drunk to share any sentiments.</p><p>I sit on a blue barrel surrounded by fifty or so drunken slum folks underneath a single bright hanging oil lantern while the Empress writes us a quest ticket and the Witch and the Shinobi eat their fill of rice balls and apple pie. And the folks ask me, “Tell us how you got your dragon parts.”</p><p>The Witch says, “They’re Dragon Scars.”</p><p>The Shinobi says nothing because he can’t.</p><p>The Empress says nothing but swear words because she accidentally wrote something like “ALUSTIVE” instead of “ALOUETTE” on the ticket with her remaining normal, but non-dominant left hand. Her dominant arm got replaced by a sleek and scaly red dragon, the head of it taking the place of her hand. Its gaping maw would’ve probably swallowed the quill whole, and who knows where it would’ve gone down into.</p><p>I say, “Well.” I say, “The Astral Dragon gave them to us.” And I point at my chest, a giant blue dragon head in place of my torso.</p><p>And the bar folks ask, “So does it feel weird to lose your body parts?”</p><p>The Shinobi shrugs and crosses his legs, two bony purple dragon legs, each with a dragon head over the knee and foot. Something tells me he feeds all four of them with how their red eyes are looking at his plate of rice balls. He slouches over and hides his clawed hands between his legs.</p><p>The Empress swears again and bangs her dragon arm, all red and scaly and sleek and ugly, and it shakes the counter.</p><p>I say, “Not really.”</p><p>I’m thinking, we lost more than our body parts, really.</p><p>Then the bar folks ask, “And how did you grow up, anyway?”</p><p>Now this is the time the Witch gets off her seat. “Rocinoll,” I say, “mind setting up some visuals?”</p><p>“Will do,” she says. And with a wave of the wand and a spark, she sets up a familiar picture: one of the Dragonblood Village and its waterfalls, one where the buildings are intact, the water is clear blue, and the grass is still green and no crimson is in sight, save for the statues of Atruum.</p><p>The way the folks talk is like how my brothers and sisters used to talk. The first brief story from tonight, the one of our village’s massacre, happened five months ago, but it’s been five years since I stopped telling stories to the orphanage kids. Five years ago was when I returned from the Warrior rites. My guess is that they didn’t need the stories anymore. After Angelo and his family moved in all the way from Marlayus, the orphanage kids, they had him and the Empress, and I needed to work.</p><p>“Stop and smell the flowers,” Angelo would say. And he’d bring out a small, white rose in his hand, a flower with a light aura that made the kids crowd around him and start asking him for stories of Marlayus and Pagnas and his homeland of Hasta and the other stuff he did before he arrived. Everyone knew his father used to be the Chief of the Marlayus Dragonblood Village before the civil war there broke out, and even before, the Ros family were prominent traders in the Hasta Dragonblood Village. So there’s that.</p><p>So here’s the stuff before Angelo.</p><p>Back when the Empress was about eight and I was ten, we used to race each other up the waterfalls surrounding our village and scream mock bird noises once we were high enough. That girl, with her dirty bare feet and dirty white hair and dirty small size, she’d climb higher and higher each time. And she would slip each time. But it was okay because I was up there too, and I’d always catch her while standing on the longest crevice because my body was too big and fat to get any higher. Then we’d climb down with our clothes all soiled and our bodies all covered in mud and the villagers would scream, “The Dragonblood Empress has gone missing!” before seeing us run down, the couple of stupid kids we were. Then they’d grunt and go back to their routines while we were still laughing, laughing, laughing.</p><p>Or there was the time I went fishing and she somehow convinced her father to let her come along. Or maybe she ran away for a bit. I don’t know. But my heart skipped a beat when I heard a tree branch snap and she fell and latched right onto my back with splinters of wood and leaves falling on us. And there was this irritating buzzing in my ear, so I looked up and saw this giant Fruit Fly with its big purple abdomen spewing out this phlegm-like slime at us. She got off my back and pointed and screeched at that thing, and me, I was already yanking her sleeve and the game I caught and booting ourselves out of there. Somehow, every time, we’d come back to villagers shouting, “The Dragonblood Empress has gone missing!” And then maybe someone would shout, “We need a new heir!” That’s typically how far they’d go before we’d come back.</p><p>Me, before I started the Warrior rites, just like right now in the bar, I used to sit on a barrel in the middle of the dimly-lit orphanage parlor. And with all the excited little boys and girls around me, I used to tell them the waterfall story. Or the Fruit Fly story. Or the time we found some purple mushrooms on the ground and I ate one and she ate one, and she said the one she ate tasted great while the one I ate got me sick for about a month. Or how we got lost in the forests of Medius and lived in a cold, wet cave for a week, but we were lucky since the Empress stole a whole pack of meat from the Chief a day before just in case, and how she came back surprisingly unscathed and how I came back without any of my clothes on. I never told these to the adults because we would’ve gotten into a lot of trouble. But it made her so happy whenever I visited her up on the bluff while she was grounded to tell her that the kids thought she was so cool, so brave, and that they would love to meet her sometime. And already those kids were able to recognize her drawings of monsters and swords and claws in the dirt, trailing all the way from the bridge to the riverbank.</p><p>The bar folks ask, “So is it true that the Monster Princess scars things before killing them?”</p><p>The Monster Princess. What a compliment, is probably what the Empress is thinking right now.</p><p>I shrug and say, “Usually.”</p><p>The Empress takes a huge gulp out of her mug of raspberry juice, then she slams it onto the table, sticking a pinky out. Her eyes smiling under the rugged white bangs of her short, sword-sliced hair, she says, “Alright, Porta,” and wipes her mouth with her malformed arm. She says, “Give us a lucky one. What’s in for today?”</p><p>The bartender grabs the mug, wipes it clean with his rag. “We just had a new one come in from Marlayus,” he says.</p><p>From the corner of my eye, I see the Empress and the Shinobi shiver at the same time, like they’re on cue.</p><p>At eight years old, the Empress, she got grounded a lot.</p><p>I mean, that was expected for the daughter of the Chief who lost his wife when she gave birth. No new heir would be coming, so she was their last shot at leading the Clan. Maybe that’s why he never really liked me, since we narrowly missed death all the time.</p><p>But really, all I was trying to do was succeed my parents.</p><p>Sure, they’re dead now, and Atruum’s sacred Den is off-limits to everyone but the Oracle, Amica. The one whom the Divine Family kidnapped. But young me wanted to believe that he had the right to see his parents’ graves, set up right in front of the dragon monument marking the Den, both of them side by side with the jars of incense still there and the traditional writing that titled them as Warriors of the Clan. The director of the orphanage told me that I looked a lot like my parents, the scales on my chest coming from my father and my round face coming from my mother. I’ve never met them so I’d just imagine, but I knew for sure that I needed to succeed them somehow.</p><p>And being some lowly orphan kid whose best friend was the Empress of the whole village, I could not miss this opportunity.</p><p>What I never told anyone, not even the Empress, was my own personal, silent vow of penance to Atruum. Even after the village elders splashed blue war paint on my chest and sent me off to do the formal rites of a Warrior at the age of eleven, I never told anyone that ever since she bailed my dumbass from getting kicked out of the village for trespassing into Atruum’s Den, I vowed myself to be the Warrior of the Empress. That was my self-proclaimed, stupid title. That’s why I was always with her.</p><p>That’s why, once the formal rites started and they sent me off to survive in the forests, alone with the sun baking my face, I think the Chief became happier about me being gone.</p><p>That’s why I think the Chief became happier about his daughter meeting Angelo.</p><p>Angelo, he isn’t mentioned in a lot of our stories. And, of course, he isn’t mentioned in the one tonight, the one about the destruction of our village. He’s another example of something I need to censor.</p><p>What the orphanage director told me a long time ago, when I became too old to be adopted—twelve or thirteen or so—she told me that my parents made a vow, too. Years and years ago, they were the Warriors of the Oracle, the one before Amica.</p><p>The orphanage director told me that my mother died of childbirth, and my father from sickness. The villagers called it “karma.”</p><p>I asked her why my father had a disease called karma and if I was gonna get it too, and she started crying. It was the soft kind of cry where she’s hiding her face from someone she shouldn't have talked to.</p><p>She told me that we didn’t have an Oracle for thirteen years after the previous one got killed by Divine Knights.</p><p>I asked her how did karma look like, and she said it was like frostbite—heavy, heavy frostbite: your skin and tissue turn pale and cold before decaying into black and cracking off. Your fingers turn black and crack off. Your toes turn black and crack off. Your life turns black and cracks off.</p><p>I did not need to ask her about how my father looked like before he died.</p><p>Maybe the fact that most of my stories have the Empress taking the lead is why one of the bar folks just now up and points at her and says, “Ey! You nevah told us ‘bout where your lass got ‘er scar!”</p><p>The Witch stops herself from taking another bite of apple pie. She and her sentient pink witch-hat-hair both raise an eyebrow.</p><p>The Shinobi, wide-eyed, drops his plate on the barrel and looks up at the Empress, then to me.</p><p>I’m sitting on the barrel, secretly praying that the Empress doesn’t say something crazy, and the folks around me turn to look at her. And she’s just looking down at her cup of raspberry juice.</p><p>The pointing guy says, “Well? Where’d you get it?”</p><p>The Empress rises from her seat, adjusts her belt and the sheath attached to it. Still not looking at the crowd and ignoring the Shinobi who’s sweating a little harder than he should, hiding himself behind his long white hair, she says, “I slipped.” She says, “I slipped and fell onto a rock. That’s all.”</p><p>The pointing guy stops pointing. “Is that so?” he asks. “Well, that sounds awfully disappointing for a real devil like you!”</p><p>And all the folks nod and laugh while we’re already leaving the bar, setting out for Marlayus.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Chapter 3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It is the Empress who agrees to take the job at Asura Gate in the far eastern nation of Marlayus, where the sky gives an ominous crimson light and the clouds part as if they were openings to heaven’s hell.</p><p>It is the Empress who holds her sword up high, shining red from the blood of her foes, as she charges into the eighth and final gate we need to seal for good.</p><p>It is the Empress who freezes the second the vile spirit screams and bats its whip of a tail, its piercing red eyes staring right at her.</p><p>The Empress, the Witch, the Shinobi, and I are right at the gateway to hell and the ocean of skulls around us seems to send spirits out, stalking us, whispering words of regret.</p><p>There it is. The Asura Goblin, the shamans call it. It whisks around the skull-flooded landscape in a dark grey and purple blur before diving into the ground through a flaming, black portal and rising in front of the Empress.</p><p>For a moment, the Empress and the Asura Goblin do nothing, the two of them only a forward step away from each other. The Empress holds her sword out beside her, the fresh blood trickling down onto the teal stone floor below. The Asura Goblin slowly flaps its six wings all around its snakelike body, rigidly coiled up at the tail. And neither of them do anything to each other.</p><p>That’s when I realize the Empress isn’t breathing.</p><p>The sharp, blood-red eyes of the Asura Goblin seem to soften up slightly. Stepping forward, the Empress reaches her dragon arm out to its face, the head of the dragon molding as best as possible into a normal hand.</p><p>For a moment, the Asura Goblin’s body glows with a light aura.</p><p>It’s so quiet I realize that I’m the one breathing the loudest.</p><p>I’m also the one who jumps the fastest when the Empress suddenly gasps and brings her bloodied sword up and slashes it across the Asura Goblin’s face, the beast howling into the sky. It glares at me before diving back into the ground, the black fire from before now trailing under my feet. The ground shakes and I jump out of the way, right before the vile beast rises through the black fire in a colossal tornado. It starts spitting pink fireballs at us.</p><p>While the Witch casts tornados back at the beast and the Shinobi assaults it with a barrage of shurikens, somehow the Empress remains standing still, a thousand-yard-stare plastered on her face.</p><p>“Lou?” I call out, snapping my fingers in front of her.</p><p>She does not flinch.</p><p>“Lou?” I call out again, this time tugging at her arm. “Please,” I say, “we have unfinished work to do.” I say, “Please.”</p><p>The Empress slowly turns her head towards me, as if her neck were a rusty door hinge, and I see she’s paler than the white rose her fiancé gave her a long time ago.</p><p>Then in the reflection of the Empress’s blank red eyes, I see the scarred face of the Asura Goblin behind me.</p><p>“Milan!” the Witch shrieks, “Watch out!”</p><p>I whip around and a loud clang rings out as the fireball clashes with the shield on my arm. From out of nowhere, the Shinobi zips in from the sky and scapes the beast’s neck with his kunai, grabbing its attention and luring it away from us and the Witch, frantically chanting and casting spells over and over and over again. Colored smoke rises around her feet, and the gleam of her goggles shines in my eyes.</p><p>Desperate, my dumbass stands right in front of the Empress and smacks her across the face. She staggers back, finally looking back at me after all this time, and I scream, “Alouette!” I scream, “We have to fucking go!”</p><p>The last thing I hear her say for a long while is… nothing.</p><p>“Alouette,” I sigh, “let’s go.”</p><p>She follows behind me, dragging her sword across the ground. The only sounds coming from her are her footsteps and the sharp shrieks of her sword, sending sparks up into the air.</p><p>Once I have my forcefield up and the Witch has her spells cast and the Shinobi has the eyes of the Asura Goblin on him, the Empress quietly extends her dragon arm—all shiny and red and hot, a dragon’s head at the end with the golden eye of the devil—and out comes a barrage of fireballs volleying right into the head of the monster.</p><p>Then the beast lets out one last painful screech up into the heavens, wherever the heavens are, and then there is silence.</p><p>I dismiss my forcefield, plant the blunt side of my axe into the ground and lean on it, sweating and huffing. The limits of Atruum’s power had nearly given out at the last second, and I had to exhaust a little more than I could properly handle to keep it up.</p><p>The Empress has probably exhausted ten times as much. Because she drops her knees to the ground and says nothing, just looking at the bloodied sword in her hand and the fresh smoke rising from her dragon arm.</p><p>And everything, everything’s quiet. Everything’s so quiet that all I hear is our heavy breathing and the hiss from the Empress’s dragon arm. The four of us, noticing that the portal behind us finally opened up, we try to turn to leave, to leave behind the ocean of skulls and the regretful spirits twisting and curling about.</p><p>But at the same time, I feel a cool essence slowly build up around us.</p><p>The Witch, frantically moving her head about, pipes up and slams her spellbook shut.</p><p>The Shinobi, convulsing in a cold sweat, grabs onto the Witch’s robes to try to stabilize himself as much as possible.</p><p>The Empress, seemingly deaf and with a hollow expression, stares straight at the evaporating body of the slain Asura Goblin.</p><p>Me, I listen to the voice.</p><p>A familiar girl’s soft voice echoes through the skull-covered landscape.</p><p>“Is anyone there?” the voice rings out. “If you can hear my voice, please listen closely.”</p><p>The coolness completely encompasses us, compelling us to stay still and hold our breaths.</p><p>After a short pause, the voice continues speaking. “I am the Dragonblood Oracle,” the voice rings out. “This was my destiny from the moment I was born.”</p><p>The distorted vision of a tall but sickly woman donning light blue robes and a face not unlike the Witch’s appears, ascending from the ground and standing out amongst the regretful spirits around us. It wraps its arms around the Witch before dispersing.</p><p>“Because of that destiny,” the voice rings out, “my clan was devastated and their lives were taken from them.”</p><p>The Shinobi scrapes his claws over his arm, briefly scratching away at the presence of a short young man in cyan and black, wearing a similar uniform as the one he wore when he gave the Empress her scar. The spirit disappears in a smear, seeming to jeer at the poor guy.</p><p>“Now, I am being used as a tool,” the voice rings out, “and left unable to pass on from this world.”</p><p>I feel a faint tug at my arm. In my free hand, I grasp the delicate hand of one of my sisters from the orphanage. On my shoulder, I feel the long-lost company of a little brother who just barely turned five years old. The sensations depart in an instant.</p><p>“If it is by human hands that I am held this way,” the voice rings out, “then please, by human hands, right this wrong.”</p><p>Then I turn my head towards the Empress and see the ravaged angel face of the man I had almost forgotten, emerging from the body of the Asura Goblin. He gets so close to her that he has his hand on her engagement ring, and she starts reaching out for what looks like his.</p><p>“Should you ever meet my friends,” the voice whispers, “please deliver this message.”</p><p>Without even thinking, I bolt to the immobile Empress and tear her away from the damn saint, turning her head away from him. “Don’t look at him,” I hiss, my vision teetering from his bruised neck to the sharp edge of his chin. “Don’t look at him,” I repeat, my voice cracking. “He’s not the same Angelo we used to know.”</p><p>“Keep kindness in your heart,” the voice breathes.</p><p>The Empress’s red eyes flare up for a second, turning more hellish than the crimson sky above. Her eyes shift toward the light aura of the man in front of us. “Lou!” I bark, “I said don’t look at him!”</p><p>The voice grows weak. “And,” it sighs, “always strive for peace.”</p><p>I look up past the chin.</p><p>“I SAID DON’T FUCKING LOOK AT HIM!” My roar drowns out the last few words of Amica’s message, echoing and rattling the skulls covering hell’s mountains and valleys.</p><p>The stillness in the air takes over. The Witch and the Shinobi stare at me, and I can tell they’re holding their breaths, too. Everything goes silent, but the Empress is the quietest of us all. The fire in her eyes has left her.</p><p>The only sounds left are of the hard footsteps we’re taking to get out of hell.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Chapter 4</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>To attract Shockfish to your line, you need the meaty insides of a Tough Chick attached to a really big fishhook. Crack the yellowed shells off the dead Chick and get its green insides all soft and squishy. With your thumb and index finger, pinch around the mess until you feel a small, dense mass. That’s the heart. You get the fishhook and pierce it right through the heart, and this along with the meat makes the line heavy enough to drop and attractive enough for the Shockfish to eat.</p><p>This is stuff I found out only after my formal Warrior training.</p><p>I take my line and toss it into the water, which is purple and red since the blood moon’s up. Then it sinks into the river, and I wait.</p><p>The Empress, the Witch, the Shinobi, and I, we’re sitting on the raft when the dark clouds bunch up and it starts to drizzle. Up in the sky, the clouds of heaven look just like hell now. And me, I’m really hoping that fishing here in Marlayus won’t be hell, but I’ll take whatever goes.</p><p>Some light sparkling noise tickles my ear. Behind me, the Witch’s waving her wand in front of the Empress’s face, saying, “A-lou-ette!” Saying, “Stop act-ing deaf!” She pokes the wand at the Empress’s nose. “I know you can hear me~!”</p><p>I just shake my head.</p><p>What happened was when we got out of Asura Gate, we had to drag the Empress along to come with us. When we got to the docks, she stopped moving her legs, so I had to carry her the rest of the way. The whole time she had the same empty, fireless expression.</p><p>The scar across her face between her eyes looks like a perfect balance between clean and rough.</p><p>The Witch holds her hand out at the Shinobi, and on it he places a prayer charm attached to a chain. Now they’re trying hypnosis. Back and forth. Back and forth. Watch the charm. Watch the line. Nothing different happens in either case.</p><p>Standing with my fishing rod in hand, I ask, “How’s it going back there?”</p><p>A sharp whizzing rings out, and after that, the roar of a Flygolin drowns itself in the water. The grey pins swerve right back to the Shinobi’s hand. “Ah, thanks, Dan!” the Witch says. The Shinobi flashes a thumbs-up with a black claw tip shining and goes back to chewing on his rice ball.</p><p>The rain starts coming down harder and little disks start popping up in the water. We don’t have any cover, but the Witch manages to stretch the ends of her sentient witch-hat-hair far enough so it covers both the Shinobi and the Empress next to her. The rain drips off the ends. From where I’m standing, she looks like the boat’s sailless mast.</p><p>By now I’m supposed to have gotten a Shockfish, but what comes out on the line are the grey remains of a popped Cloudfish. All of its jelly bulb’s dissolved somewhere. I drop the thing next to me and get another mass of Tough Chick from my sack on the floor. It stinks.</p><p>The Witch says a low chant and the spark of her wand turns pink. She says, “Come on, Alouette.” She says, “I don’t wanna have to smush dead meat in your face…”</p><p>Sitting next to the smelly sack, under the shade, the Empress’s still quiet. Her ragged cloak’s pulled over her dragon arm, and on her lap are her hands, like two dead fish folded over each other.</p><p>I’m not native to Marlayus by any means, but I can be a patient guy. You’d have to be one if you’re gonna be a fisher. If you’re gonna be a Warrior. This is the stuff they try to get you to understand in formal Warrior training.</p><p>I drop the line and bait into the water again, and it splashes. The rain starts soaking over my shoulders and my hair. What fishing for monsters teaches you is not to expect anything.</p><p>Here, everything the Witch tries—medicines, healing spells, hypnosis, meat-smushing—she’s still expecting some sort of result. I don’t tell her that.</p><p>Instead, I turn to look over my shoulder and ask, “Roci?” I ask, “Do you know anything anyone would use a fishhook for?”</p><p>“Hm?” The spark of her wand changes from pink to white. “Like, fishing?”</p><p>I say, “No, other than that.”</p><p>How it happened was a day after the festival, after the massacre, the Empress and I left camp so we could go fishing. Us walking along the riverbank, drawings of Ogres and some unintelligible scratches dotted the way. We trailed all the way up the bank before stopping at a thatched fishing hut.</p><p>Me and my fishing rod, to the Witch and the Shinobi, we were just getting food. But to me, we needed to calm down. We needed a break.</p><p>“Well,” I say, “a few years ago, in the village, some ex-Warriors went rogue and started attacking folks with fishhooks.”</p><p>This makes the Witch freeze her wand and the charm in the air. Her goggles gleam pink from the water. “For serious?” she asks. “Dan, is Milly making all this up?”</p><p>His mouth full, the Shinobi shakes his head.</p><p>I say, “Oh, yeah, he knows,” and cover my head with a rag. “The joke was those guys never properly passed the Warrior trial, and the Oracle actually warned the league against letting them in.” I tell her, “They got in just because they had no other options for their futures. They liked fishing but they also really wanted to have some good fights. Or go fishing for kippers.” I don’t tell her that some of them lived in the orphanage at some point. They started fishing because I started fishing. I started fishing because the orphanage director was fishing Everyone and their dead Warrior father was fishing. And now here I am fishing on my own.</p><p>The Witch looks up and says, “Fishing for kippers?”</p><p>I tell her, ask the Empress when she’s ready.</p><p>The morning on the riverbank, the Empress kept itching her new dragon arm under her cloak. She looked at her feet as she walked, leaving temporary footprints in the sand. Knowing nothing, I put my free hand on her shoulder and asked, “You okay?” Like there was any chance she’d be fine after what happened.</p><p>She replied, “Just thinking about how this’ll be the last time we see this place.” She traced her non-dominant hand over her scar, which was stitched up but still bleeding a little. After the Astral Dragon sent us off, the Shinobi offered to stitch up her wound, and the Witch used some healing spells to stop the bleeding. I was supposed to go ahead and get some food, but lying on the mat in the grass, the Empress, she told me to wait for her. So she could come along.</p><p>In my mind, I thought, I’m being so useless right now. Because despite this scar healing and all, nothing’s gonna get her fiancé back to her. The only thing we could do was to find the Oracle. As if the only way we could save her was to make ourselves tools to the very same people who hate us. Who took everything away from us.</p><p>As if I hadn’t been a tool already.</p><p>She climbed up the stairs of the hut and leaned against the wooden railing. Looking at me with her eyes low, her hair bright against the sunlight, she asked me if she could stay in the hut for a while and I said, sure. I’ll try to be quick. I’ll get a big one for us. It’s the best I can do. So she disappeared through the door as I dropped my line into the water.</p><p>“There’s a reason why I can’t let Lou touch a fishing rod,” I say, “let alone a fishhook.”</p><p>Everyone except the Empress is facing me now. The Shinobi raises an eyebrow and I say, he doesn’t need to know.</p><p>I lift my line out of the water and pluck a small Battle Crab off it. “So, nobody died,” I say, “but the incident got so infamous that whenever someone saw a fishhook, it reminded them of what happened.” I take my fishhook and make it shine crimson from the blood moon. “Especially when it’s a big one.”</p><p>Scooting up next to the Shinobi, to his ear, the Witch whispers, “It looks like a sickle…”</p><p>The hook with the meat drops into the water again. “You know what happened to those Warriors?” I ask. “They all got exiled, but they were allowed to return after some time, under the condition they could never fish again.”</p><p>The Empress continues staying silent.</p><p>The Shinobi swallows his fill of rice balls, but doesn’t get another one out.</p><p>“Once their time-out was up, though, some travelers found them dead,” I say, “killed, off the side of the road, near a popular fishing spot.”</p><p>The rain crashes down so hard it’s drowning out my voice, so the Witch and the Shinobi move closer.</p><p>“And you know how they ended up that way?” I ask. “How they died?” The raindrops cascade down my shoulders and I try not to shiver.</p><p>Despite the stench of the meat, the fish, the cold air, the Empress is still sitting upright and blank.</p><p>Back on the riverbank, sometime later, I just reeled in a few decently-sized basses when a muffled scream echoed from inside the hut. Something got knocked over. And then another thing. A series of light thumps on the wooden floor.</p><p>It’s kind of terrible how slow formal Warrior training and fishing makes you.</p><p>By the time I lugged my sack over to the hut, I found the Empress leaning against the doorframe. The bloody doorframe, because she was sick and shaking, and her bloody hands and legs smeared red fingerprints all over it.</p><p>Out the door, the Empress, she was hugging herself around her waist, her red-marred waist, limping. When she saw me she smiled weakly. Crying and bleeding but smiling.</p><p>“Holy shit,” I said, dropping my sack to run up and grab her. And when I did this, she laughed. She laughed and said, “I’m gonna be fine, Milo.” Her tears and blood soaking my chest, she said, “I’ll be fine. Atruum won’t let me die…” and then she stopped talking and moving.</p><p>Looking over her shoulder, inside the hut and on the wooden floor, there was so much blood. It seeped through the planks and painted a huge circle of red, splashed under a fishing rod and a fishhook completely smeared the same color.</p><p>That was all I got to see before I carried the Empress in my arms, ran and screamed for help.</p><p>And when we got back to camp so the Shinobi and the Witch could check on her, a second time at that point, they couldn’t find any obvious wound.</p><p>The rain soaking the floor around me now, I tell them, “What happened was those Warriors brought the big ol’ fishhooks with them.”</p><p>Even now the Empress hasn’t told me what really happened to her.</p><p>“And,” I say, “they all killed themselves, right there. With fishhooks.”</p><p>I don’t tell them that those fishhooks were stolen. Stolen from me. Because I made them myself.</p><p>After a silent moment, the Witch raises her hand shyly and asks, “But… why did they do that?”</p><p>Even now, all the Empress told me was, it had something to do with Atruum.</p><p>For a second, I almost say I don’t know. Instead, I tell her, softly, “They were scared.” The clouds break apart and the blood moon shines down so clear on all of us, basking us in red and pink. I tell her, “It’s possible someone from the Divine Family threatened to kill them. Torture them. Because they hate us Dragonbloods.”</p><p>The Witch retracts her witch-hat-hair back to normal, and the Empress sits with her dead hands and dead face.</p><p>I don’t tell her it might just be a Warrior thing. Like why my father got frostbite. Whether or not it was taught in formal Warrior training, I don’t know, because I missed my first few months.</p><p>I feel something hard tug at my line, so as I’m talking I’m reeling in really hard. “So that’s one reason why people started getting scared of me.” I’m talking louder as the rain lets up. “I was one of the few Warriors who still fished,” I say, and pull on the rod hard. “I just fished alone because I didn’t want people thinking I’d kill them.”</p><p>I take one last look at the Empress’s scar before I throw myself back and a huge Shockfish lands on my chest.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Chapter 5</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Here’s another story I never managed to tell anyone. This story, it happened to me eight, nine, or ten or so years ago.</p><p>At one point, when the Empress turned eight and I was ten, the Chief started sending her off to Atruum’s sacred Den, where the Dragonblood Oracle Amica stayed. The entrance of the Den had towering red and black, moss-covered dragon statues in front of it. Anyone could see them, no matter how high up the waterfalls they were. With her size small and her voice high, the Oracle, she had the looks of one of the younger kids at the orphanage. But you could tell it was her because she wore those traditional black Oracle clothes that were passed down through the centuries. She also had these bright green dragon horns sticking out the sides of her head. This girl, Amica, she almost never left the Den. All we knew was that Atruum’s heart was inside, however that looked.</p><p>One thing for certain was that no one was allowed inside the Den, except for Amica.</p><p>We heard stories about her singing from the adults. The Chief, he already knew about it, but he still sent the Empress to ask her to sing. Every day, every morning, afternoon, and night. And the Chief would ground her if she didn’t report at those intervals.</p><p>So from then on, every day, standing in front of the broken monuments, next to the Oracle who was older but shorter than her, quieter but tidier than her, more content but lonelier than her, the Empress would ask, “Can you sing one of your songs for us?” And with a small smile and a nod, Amica’s singing would pierce the soul and beyond. I heard it myself. She would sing in the ancient language only a Dragonblood could understand—simple phrases of worship and praise and blessing towards the Astral Dragon. It was the type of soft, chilling tune that would stick in your memory even long after she got taken hostage by the Divine Family. A ringworm that wouldn’t leave me alone even after my ears nearly froze off in Pagnas years later.</p><p>Technically, I wasn’t supposed to accompany them. All I cared about was visiting my parents’ graves. I’ve explained this before. Sitting by their gravestones, pretending to pray to Atruum, listening to the ringworm that was Amica’s singing, all that crossed my mind was that I’d need to succeed them somehow.</p><p>Personally, I barely talked to Amica. She was already preoccupied with the Empress. “Maybe one day, Amica and I can do a duet together,” the Empress would say. “And I hope by then I’ll be just as good as her!” Then we’d laugh and I’d sit in front of my parents’ graves while the two of them practiced singing and speaking the language of the Astral Dragon.</p><p>Me, I made the mistake of telling stories about Amica to the orphanage kids. They wanted to hear her singing, too.</p><p>Everyone did.</p><p>There were these two siblings from the orphanage who used to follow me around when I wasn’t doing my duties. The little one, the boy with the fangs, he would always yank at my pants for me to carry him on my shoulders. His much, much quieter sister would trail behind us to make sure nothing happened to him. Occasional scolding. Occasional facepalming. The boy with the fangs would dress up as me sometimes, running out the doors of the orphanage whenever I’d come back from hunting to do his best strong man impression.</p><p>I didn’t realize that they followed me when I visited my parents’ graves, and that the boy with the fangs went inside the Den, too.</p><p>And no one was allowed inside the Den, except for Amica.</p><p>Things eventually got to the point where the adults did take notice.</p><p>The timing of the “tradition” was too perfect for it to be a coincidence.</p><p>My eleventh birthday. The village elders threw some blue war paint on my chest, over my scales and the fat of my belly, and started calling me the Warrior. Not the Warrior of the Clan, not the Warrior of the Astral Dragon, not the Warrior of any other huge thing. Just the Warrior. Half a year later, after some preparations, they gave me a fishing rod and a weapon of my choice—I picked the battleaxe—and a little bit of monster meat, then sent me off to survive in the forests of Medius. The bigger, stronger guys carried me in my sleep to the middle of a forest clearing, and when I awoke, it was just my fishing rod, my axe, my sack, and I, lying in the grass, surrounded by the chirps and growls of whatever was out there. It seemed to be a traditional rite at first, for me to be out there with barely any clothes on at the age of eleven, alone with the sun baking my face. I thought it was normal for me to stay out there for so long.</p><p>No one wanted to adopt an eleven-year-old, though. </p><p>Not someone as big and fat and heavy as me.</p><p>Not someone who broke the rules, broke into Atruum’s Den multiple times with no repercussions.</p><p>Not someone who caused a little boy to break the rules.</p><p>Maybe it was my fault that I decided to take on the responsibilities of the orphanage. My fault that I loved sharing stories so much to inspire the kids. My fault that I decided to stay out of the village for a few extra weeks or months. That I revisited the cave the Empress and I took shelter in when we got lost years ago and beat up the Demonpillars that ate my clothes. I just sat in the middle of that cold, wet cave, hauling the fish I caught and the wood I chopped while it was raining, and breathed in the familiar, rancid stench. Some of the stolen meat leftovers were still there.</p><p>The Empress was not.</p><p>The Empress was with Amica, and I was in the cave.</p><p>It was like this for who knows how long. But no one ever yelled, “The Warrior has gone missing!” No one ever yelled that.</p><p>Maybe it was my fault that I looked after her so much, even though I wasn’t supposed to.</p><p>Maybe it was why she got into trouble so much, and no one wanted to admit it.</p><p>So this wasn’t tradition. This was exile.</p><p>This was just my very, very late punishment.</p><p>So when the rain stopped pouring and the monsters stopped growling, I headed back to town. The war paint was blessed; it never came off my body, and it even weathered through the rain and the scratches given to me by the Goblins. I gained a few muscles, too.</p><p>But what I did lose was the smile on my face when I walked into the village and everyone just stared at me, hauling the fish and the axe and the empty sack. That’s when I realized I smelled like crap. My soiled blue garb looked like slum rags. My white hair turned frizzy and, well, not white. And I had dead fish on my back.</p><p>But damn did I have some good muscles.</p><p>Probably my only redeeming quality.</p><p>I opened the doors of the orphanage and dropped off the fish, waved hello to the director like it was nothing. Just like old times, except none of the kids were in the parlor, none of them were sitting around the barrel. And I smelled like crap.</p><p>Then I looked at the round calendar loosely nailed to the wall and saw that I missed my twelfth birthday. I missed the fifth birthday of the boy with the fangs. I missed the fiftieth birthday of the director. I missed the five thousandth anniversary of the day Atruum saved his people.</p><p>Worst of all, I missed the Empress’s tenth birthday. And it was today.</p><p>Younger me just could not live that down.</p><p>And I had never jumped into a clean pool so fast in my life.</p><p>Afterward, I picked a last-minute gift—one of the giant fish I caught, because I was stupid—and bolted off to find her.</p><p>In front of the largest tree near the village center was the wooden party bench, surrounded by the kids from the orphanage, the kids from the other families, and a few of the village elders and counselors. From the little room I could see through, in the center of the tight crowd sat the Empress, with a wide smile on her face. Next to her stood a boy I’ve never seen before, some kid with an angel-face and white hair that stood up like angel feathers.</p><p>Me, I walked a ways farther from the group, sniffing my armpits and trying to fix up my hair as neatly as possible. And I was carrying a fish on my back, again.</p><p>Then I tilted my head a bit and saw that the Empress wore a black-and-red, traditional ornate dress.</p><p>I could be wrong, but I think this was the first time she’s ever worn that dress.</p><p>Her hair, too, had no dirt anywhere and was held up by a red headband.</p><p>The Empress, what the hell, she even wore shoes. She never wore shoes, until then at least.</p><p>For a moment, I thought I was heading to the wrong party. It was her attitude that gave her away. Tell younger me that the peppy Empress would grow up to be an angry, burning, scar-faced mercenary, and he wouldn’t believe you.</p><p>And me, too fixated on the fact that I was able to see the Empress’s whole self, I didn’t realize how quiet things got and that people actually moved out of the way, until it was too late. Because one of the adults suddenly looked around, flared his nostrils, and said, “Where’s that foul stench coming from?”</p><p>Then everyone stopped and looked at me. Everyone stared. Their eyes, they pored over me from head to toe. And no one made a sound.</p><p>The angel-faced kid, he was sweating hard, pulling his head back a bit. He rubbed his arm and the bridge of his nose, covered his mouth and bit his nails. He was already doing that before I even showed up, actually.</p><p>And the Empress, that girl, she immediately jumped up, ran around the table, lunged at me, and hugged me.</p><p>All while the Chief screamed at her, “Don’t!” He screamed, “Don’t hug that brute, Alouette!” He pointed at us and spat, “Don’t you touch him! You don’t even know who he is!”</p><p>So not even the Chief recognized me.</p><p>Everyone else kept backing away, retreating under the shade of the giant tree. “Everyone” included the little boy with fangs and his quiet sister.</p><p>And me, I kept smelling like crap and fish.</p><p>For some reason, the Empress kept hugging me. Turning her head to the Chief, she said, “But, Papa...” She said, “It’s Milo, don’t you remember?”</p><p>Fuming, the Chief shook his head. “Who in the world is Milo?” he hissed.</p><p>The oil from the fish and my sweat trailed down my shoulders. “It’s Milan!” the Empress exclaimed. “Milan is here!” She jumped up, grabbed my head and pointed it towards the Chief, pulling me down slightly. “You can’t recognize him, Papa?”</p><p>The Chief threw up his hands.</p><p>Then the Empress swung my face towards the angel-faced kid. “Angelo,” she said, “This is Milo. He was the best friend I was talking about!” She asked, “Will you say hello?”</p><p>This Angelo kid just nodded shyly. He clutched onto an illuminating white rose.</p><p>The Empress let go of my head. With her arm around my waist, she said, “Milo, please introduce yourself.”</p><p>So I opened my mouth and said, “Hi.”</p><p>And whoever’s voice that was, I didn’t recognize it. Because that was the deepest twelve-year-old voice I’ve ever heard. I bit my tongue after saying just that.</p><p>The rest of the crowd was already backed up against the giant tree.</p><p>No one looked at me, save for the Empress at my side. And I guess the giant, stinking, oily fish on my back counted, too.</p><p>The Empress’s eyes opened wide. “Holy crap,” she said. “You sound so cool.”</p><p>I wanted to tell her, no, no, I really didn’t.</p><p>The Chief finally confronted us without any scolding. It took him a moment before he started talking. “Milan,” he sighed, crossing his arms, “your Warrior induction ceremony was supposed to happen two months ago.”</p><p>The deep twelve-year-old voice said, “I see, sir.”</p><p>Then the Chief said, “Go and see the other Warriors.” He said, “And please tidy yourself up. Both of you.”</p><p>I guess the Empress started smelling like fish, too.</p><p>“I… will go inform the others,” the Chief sighed before going away.</p><p>The Empress, standing a head and a half shorter than me, wearing shoes and a headband and a dress, somehow still refused to let go.</p><p>“Lou,” I whispered, “I’m sorry. I have to go.”</p><p>“Oh, I know,” the Empress replied, lowering her voice. “I just wanna say thanks for visiting, that’s all.”</p><p>My eyes were fixated on the now-empty wooden bench. The stench from the fish on my back filled my nostrils. “Oh, yeah,” I added, “do you mind if I drop off your present?”</p><p>“Is it the fish?”</p><p>“Yeah.”</p><p>“Then yes, please!”</p><p>And I did so, plopping the fish down in the center of the table. The oil dripped down the spaces between the planks. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking back then.</p><p>The last thing I saw on that bench was the Empress digging in. The Empress, and only the Empress.</p><p>So I was walking along the dirt path when I realized what I forgot.</p><p>I turned around and said, “Have a happy birthday.” And the noise of the returning crowd drowned that out so fast.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. Chapter 6</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When the Empress, the Witch, the Shinobi, and I walk into the bar after a week spent traveling from Marlayus, the bell chime from the door makes the noisy bar-goers go silent. All of their tired eyes turn to us, them charging with energy in an instant despite the lateness of the night. In the center of the bar is a ring of these folk, looking almost like eager grown children, surrounding the blue barrel under the bright oil lamp that marks my usual spot. Their smiles reveal their crooked teeth, and their hands, ready on their mugs, prepare for a toast.</p><p>The toast doesn’t end up happening. Because instead of sitting on the barrel, I sit by the counter, away from the ring, and the Witch and the Shinobi follow, too, pulling the Empress along by the hand.</p><p>Me, my back’s turned away from the folks, but all I can hear is their uneven, erratic breathing. Not even the creak of the floorboards, not even the clink of a glass, not even the sound of paper getting brushed by the nighttime wind. The whole place is in such an awkward silence that I’m tempted to break a glass or spill a mug so I could hear something other than just breathing all the time.</p><p>The hard thump of a fist on wood kickstarts everything. “What the ‘ell?” someone says. “We’ve been waitin’ ‘ere all day for you lot to come back! Come on, tell us a story!”</p><p>“Maybe he’s still preparing something,” another, more composed voice says from the other side of the ring. “Just give him a few minutes and he’ll tell us a grand tale in no time.”</p><p>“He had two weeks! I counted!” yells a voice coming from right behind me. “He just went to Marlayus! Tell us about Marlayus! Tell us a story!”</p><p>I squeeze my eyes shut, nearly crush the wooden mug in my hand, focus all my mental energy into it. “Give me something with no alcohol,” I say to the bartender.</p><p>Soon the whole crowd starts chanting, “Tell us a story!” The crowd chants, louder, “Tell us a story!”</p><p>I squeeze the mug more strongly, but the din of these wild animals right behind me pierces through my mental shell, as if the Asura Goblin were about to strike at my back at any moment.</p><p>The crowd chants, “Tell us a story!” Their voices grow louder and louder and the crowd chants, “Tell us a story!”</p><p>My eyes still closed, the darkness in my vision transforms into the face of the Empress, her eyes as empty and dead as an extinguished fire.</p><p>The crowd’s voices grow more desperate and the folks start rattling and slamming tables in time with the chant, and the crowd shouts, “Tell us a story!”</p><p>My eyes still closed, the face of the Empress transforms into the unwilting white rose, the pure white of its petals stained with blood.</p><p>The crowd screams, “Tell us a story!” The crowd screams, “Tell us a story, you goddamn Dragonblood!”</p><p>And before I start seeing the ravaged, rock-smashed angel face of Angelo, I silently rise from my seat and let out a long, long breath. The rattling stops. The slamming stops. The breathing stops. All eyes are on us, on me, and I turn around to face the ring, open my eyes and start scanning the area around me. Some of the folks start pulling themselves back a little. Even the Witch and the Shinobi are staring at me. The only one who doesn’t care to look is the Empress, who’s fiddling with something in her hand.</p><p>This time, I don’t think I’m smelling like crap and fish.</p><p>At first, my mouth opens but nothing comes out. Everyone’s still shut up so I take another breath before I start speaking. “Everyone,” I say, taking a few quick breaths in between, “there are some things that are better left unshared.”</p><p>The crowd stays quiet for another moment until someone in the back says, “So wouldn’t you be better off sharing it?” The audacity of this guy, he says, “Aren’t you supposed to be brave, Dragonblood?”</p><p>I grind my teeth, stare right into the eyes of the guy, and say, “Why don’t you fucking come over here and tell us your life story, then?” I say, “I’m not fucking obligated to give you drunkards a piece of my damn life.” I say, “You understand?”</p><p>The crowd nods.</p><p>I say, “Do you understand?”</p><p>“Yes,” the crowd says, in its myriad of voices.</p><p>I stand for a moment, thinking, before saying, “I’ll make another story one day. Just don’t ever make me tell this one.”</p><p>“Yes,” the crowd says. Then the ring disperses and the folks go back to their own seats, and the chatter returns to the same level as before we got into the bar.</p><p>I sit back down by the counter and I’m greeted by the sound of pouring liquid. “It’s raspberry juice,” the bartender tells me. “And it’s on the house. You look very tense.”</p><p>“Raspberry juice, huh?” I reply. “Yeah, thanks.” I nudge the Empress on the arm and point the mug towards her. “Lou, you want this?”</p><p>She doesn’t reply. Her eyes focus on the glimmer of the gold-and-silver engagement ring on her left hand. She runs the stubby fingers of her dragon hand over it, making sure its maw doesn’t chomp down. The ring, it has the evenly-jagged engravings that only one of the Dragonblood Clan could make.</p><p>I crack my neck and lean over on the bar table, my left hand pressed against my cheek and ear. My fingers, they play with the two silver ring piercings at the top of my ear, while a different, single, long earring dangles off my earlobe. It’s been five years since I put those two rings on, and I haven’t taken them off, ever—except to clean, of course. The Empress made them for me, something to remind me of the people I’m close to. The kind of cute friendship stuff thirteen-year-olds do, but with a thin, long chisel and not beads. Her style. On the inside of one of them is carved, “Lou.” On the inside of the other one is carved, “Angelo.”</p><p>To my right, the Witch’s earring, identical to the long one I have, it gleams yellow and orange from the oil lamps above us as she and the Shinobi read through one of her tomes. We got the full pair during a tomb rescue we had to do in her homeland of Litus, the desert. The appraisers told us the earrings have words carved in dead people’s blood, aged at least thirty days old. These earrings are much older than that, so the carvings have dulled by now. Whether or not they were cursed they did not know, and the Witch really thought they were. So to prove to her, to make her brave, that nothing would happen, we split the pair between us.</p><p>These days she seems more confident than ever.</p><p>I guess the question is whether or not my own karma is safe.</p><p>The bartender raises a wrinkled, grey eyebrow, and points to the Empress. “That girl,” he says, leaning over the counter towards me, “she is usually one to talk first, is she not?”</p><p>“She saw something I’d rather not talk about,” I whisper, taking a sip out of the mug.</p><p>“I see.” The bartender brushes his furry mustache. “Well, I don’t see it any good to force it out of you. Milan, is it?”</p><p>“That’s right.”</p><p>“You and the other Dragonbloods have gotten quite a reputation lately.” He starts preparing a plate of rice balls for the Shinobi and apple pie for the Witch. “Even the citizens of the upper city are buzzing about you.”</p><p>I let out a sigh, take another sip. “I don’t like it,” I say.</p><p>“You don’t?”</p><p>“Not right now, at least.” I take another swig, let the sharp sourness of the last bits of juice flow down my throat. “Don’t tell anyone I said this, Porta,” I whisper, “but we’re always willing to take any quest so we could haul our asses over to King Medius and get our Oracle back.”</p><p>The bartender returns to a straight expression. He shrugs. “King Medius has been acting much more aggravated for his age,” he says, handing the plates of food over to the Shinobi and the Witch. “But he’s getting you kids involved. That doesn’t sit well with me, you know? I don’t care that you’re all Dragonbloods.” He points a finger at me. “If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you, Milan? Thirty?”</p><p>I say, “Twenty.”</p><p>He replies, “Oh, damn.” His cheeks turning red, he says, “Much younger than I expected, too.” He takes my empty mug, washes it with sort-of unclean water and wipes it with a rag. “If it means anything, I have a few more quest tickets here.” He squats under the counter and comes back up with a yellowed piece of paper. “All from the upper city.”</p><p>I take a look at it, eyeing the section that reads, “THE NORTHERN FEDERATION OF PAGNAS - IN NEED OF RECOVERY AFTER BLIZZARD. SEVERAL SOLDIERS HAVE GONE MISSING.”</p><p>I shiver at the thought of the freezing cold, biting at my skin, biting at my father’s skin, never to be seen again. In my mind, something tells me that I have unfinished business to do. In my mind, something is about to strike at my back.</p><p>I flip the paper back to the bartender, mark the section in question. “We’ll take this one,” I say. “Know anybody who could lend us a boat?”</p><p>“Mmhm,” he says. “A young lad named Nauta has excellent-quality ferry boats for rent. He’s from the upper city.”</p><p>I leave an extra bag of gold on the counter. “Thank you, Porta,” I say before calling for the others to leave.</p><p>The bartender stares at the bag. “I thought I said it’s on the house,” he says.</p><p>His words barely reach out the front door. I reply, “It’s on me.” I reply, “It’s always on me. Count on it.”</p><p>So the Empress, the Witch, the Shinobi, and I find the guy, rent out a blue ferry with the ornate yellow decorations of the Kingdom of Medius, and set off for the north in the same night.</p><p>We travel upstream for about a week, mostly at nighttime to avoid the attention of the Battle Crabs and Tough Chicks swarming about, bringing along a makeshift tent for us to sleep in whenever we stop for the day. While I’m steering the ship, following the stars dotted amongst the dark sky above, the Witch flips to the back pages of her spellbook, brings out a quill and ink from her sack, and passes them to the Shinobi. She says a quick chant that generates a light glow at the tip of her wand in order for them to see.</p><p>“Dan!” she exclaims. “You can write on these pages to talk to me.”</p><p>At first, the Shinobi simply has the quill and ink in his hands and the small, diary-like spellbook on his lap, dumbfounded. The Witch sees this and says, “I don’t mind! They’re blank even with my goggles on.” Since I’m focused on the currents of the river and the stars and have my eye on the Empress sitting next to me as well, I can’t see what the Shinobi’s writing in response.</p><p>The Witch makes a little hum and says, “Dan, you saw the spirits at the Asura Gate, right?” After a moment of the soft scratching of a pen on paper, she says, “Really? What was his name? … Ena? … So he was a miracle child. Your friend sounds really cool, Dan!”</p><p>As I look to the sky, the grey fog in the distance soon clears up to reveal the giant, white axehead piercing the clouds above. Below it rise the puffs of smoke and fire emitting from the huge metal bridge supporting the mechanized heart of Pagnas itself. The purple tops of the towers shine against the darkness of the night all around us, leading us through the icy river.</p><p>Scratching replaces the high voice of the Witch again. Then it stops. Under her breath she’s enunciating the words. “My lover,” she reads, “… I killed him.” She pauses. The two of them are probably looking at each other. “Oh, Dan,” she sighs, “I”—she pauses—”No, I’m not afraid of you at all. No,” she says, “I understand. You had to do it. I’m so sorry. I hope he had a good life… I figure he did at least…” </p><p>From a distant childhood memory, behind the bushes during a spring festival, I hear the voice of the Empress tell me, “I don’t trust Shinobis. They kill other people and they kill their own kind too.” The voice tells me, “You see the one climbing up the tree there, chasing the one with the torch? I bet they’re both gonna fall.” And she was right. And one of them, older but still thin as hell, the survivor, he’s in the ferry with us right now.</p><p>The Witch adjusts her goggles. “Wait, sorry,” she says, chuckling awkwardly. “You just wrote all over the appendix.” She pats her knees for a bit before saying, “Um, Dan, you can sleep now if you want.” So the Shinobi turns over on the bench and does.</p><p>The Witch hums a little song for the rest of the way, until we’re nearly under the bridge. She suddenly stops, taps at my back. “Dande’s always tired and Alouette doesn’t talk anymore,” the Witch says, pouting.</p><p>“Hey, they can hear you,” I quip.</p><p>“It doesn’t matter,” she replies. The strong orange torchlights from the industrial lodges shine on the ferry and the underbelly of the bridge, basking us in a warm glow. And the Witch says, “I wanna talk to someone.”</p><p>Since the current’s strong and manageable enough for the ferry to just float through to the other side of the bridge, I take a seat on the side of the ferry, facing her. “Alright,” I say, “go ahead.”</p><p>“I never knew Papá,” the Witch says. “Mamá told me he went missing in a tomb while she was pregnant with me… and he never came back. His spirit didn’t even show up...” She twiddles her thumbs around a bit, then she suddenly stops. “Milan,” she asks, “how did your dad die?”</p><p>I sit and think for a moment. In the distance, on the mountains, the rumbling of an avalanche rolls by, sending thin sprays of snow into the air. “He had karma,” I say, finally.</p><p>“Karma?”</p><p>“Frostbite, I mean.”</p><p>“But we have frost-stopper bones to cure exactly that, don’t we?”</p><p>I gulp down the lump in my throat. “He either forgot to bring some,” I sigh, “or he didn’t bring any on purpose.”</p><p>“Oh…”</p><p>We soon float to the other side of the bridge, and once again we are put back into darkness, but the brightness of the stars and the moon keep us company as we approach the dock.</p><p>“Milly, is it okay if we can talk again later?” the Witch asks softly. “It’s so lonely since Alouette won’t talk to me anymore.”</p><p>“We can, don’t worry.”</p><p>“Thank you.”</p><p>We dock the ferry, and after a few minutes of asking around for someone not afraid to sell us a room, one of the Pagnas Knights admits us to a lodging right at the inside of the peak of one of the Tarpol Mountains, the one notorious for the constant avalanches. At least it’s cheap and close to our meeting place for our quest the next day. It’s a small room with wooden scaffolding and creaky metal-and-wood floors, but there are four beds and a desk and that should be enough.</p><p>The Shinobi stays awake long enough to get up and pick a bed before falling asleep again. The Witch takes off her heavy robe and drapes it over him.</p><p>The Empress sits by the desk, taking a scrap of paper she borrowed from the Witch, and starts drawing something on it.</p><p>The Witch and I, we stand by the open window just to look at the stars. And that’s when we start talking.</p><p>“Milan,” the Witch asks, “do you think that Alouette is… possessed?”</p><p>I nearly choke on my own spit. “What? No,” I say. “She was always restless.”</p><p>“But that makes no sense!” She crosses her arms and huffs, her breath accumulating into a small wisp in front of her. “No one stays awake for weeks straight, right!? And even then she’s usually more talkative.” The Witch grinds her thumbs into her temples. “I just don’t get it,” she mumbles. “None of my healing spells work on her either.”</p><p>“Okay, okay,” I reply, scratching my jaw, “then maybe she’s going through shock. Just like Dande.”</p><p>The Witch puts her head down on the windowsill. “Gosh, I feel bad for Dan, too,” she says, looking at the Shinobi on the lower bunk, him shivering and wrapped around with the Witch’s coat. Then the Witch blurts out, “I really wanna know what he sounds like.”</p><p>“He grunts a lot,” I say.</p><p>She crosses her arms, adjusts her lopsided goggles. “I mean, in an understandable language.”</p><p>A snowflake flying through the open window lands on my finger. “You haven’t heard him speak in the Astral Dragon’s tongue?” I ask. “He does that whenever he’s praying in the Den, pretty sure.”</p><p>“Huh, well,” the Witch says, putting on an awkward smile, “I don’t really understand it that much…” She then lets out a sigh. “I’m not from the village, Milly,” she says, “and you know that…”</p><p>I clear my throat. “He keeps praying about a vow of silence as a penance of some sort,” I say. My breath starts turning cold. “That doesn’t really sound like possession to me,” I continue, “so Lou’s probably the same case—cough!” The dry cough escapes my mouth and grazes my throat.</p><p>“I’m not really buying that, Milly,” the Witch retorts.</p><p>I let out another cough, more violent than the last. “Rocinoll,” I sigh, “there’s a lot of things I can’t really explain.”</p><p>She says, “Maybe you’re not trying hard enough?”</p><p>A low drone of falling rocks and chunks grows louder from the outside.</p><p>I say, “I’m doing my best.”</p><p>A rumbling sensation starts building up on the creaky wooden floorboards.</p><p>And then she says, “Then why did you hide the fact that you hated Angelo?”</p><p>A thundering avalanche tumbles down the mountainside, sending giant clouds of white dust into the air, into the window. The Witch doesn't get hit by the snow, but she stumbles backwards and shrieks so loudly that the Shinobi’s head slams into the bottom of the top bunk.</p><p>Me, I have to bite down on my tongue, my dry tongue, to prevent myself from making another outburst. Each bone in my spine, from bottom to top, starts chilling, freezing as cold as ice for a brief moment.</p><p>Still on the floor, the startled Witch makes a quick gesture and starts chanting over and over again, “It’s a sign, it’s a sign!” She says, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” She says, “I wasn’t supposed to say that! I’m sorry!”</p><p>I close the window, start approaching her so I can help her up. The Witch inches away from me, biting her lip. “Are you going to hurt me?” she asks, her words unsteady.</p><p>“Roci, no,” I reply, lowering my voice. A lump chokes up my throat. “Why would I do that to you?”</p><p>The Witch’s lips start shaking. “Because,” she says, “you’re making the same face as the one you made when you were screaming at Angelo.”</p><p>Now I see how big my reflection is in her goggles.</p><p>My terrible, terrible, creased-up eyebrows and flared-up nostrils and bared teeth and ice-cold blue eyes, bloodshot and wide—right here is a monster out for blood, churning out puffs of dead souls with each breath.</p><p>In a way, the lump in my throat is a word. And that word is “hate.” “Hate” is a strong word, a dry word. “Dislike” is the preferred one that comes to mind. Inside of me, I choke up this dry word until it’s right at the tip of my tongue, and then it stays there to burn.</p><p>This monster, this damn failure of a Warrior, right when I think I can’t take him anymore, softens up the moment I say, “Roci, okay, I’m sorry.”</p><p>Now the Witch takes my hand and I pull her up, but I refuse to look at her. Instead, I look at the Empress, who, despite what just happened, is lying down on her bed. Her eyes are still open, not looking at anything in particular. On the desk she was at, the scrap of paper is filled with crude ink drawings of monsters and swords and claws and roses.</p><p>The burnt black smoke from the smoldering word, “hate,” I let it flow out of my mouth in a deep, deep sigh. “Roci,” I say, putting a hand on her shoulder, “are you comfortable sleeping tonight?”</p><p>The Witch nods.</p><p>“Oh, good,” I say. “You’re the only one in this room who’s still sane.”</p><p>“I know,” she replies. She suddenly gives me a hug and says, “I’m doing my best myself.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. Chapter 7</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Because I feel like it, I’m going to reveal Angelo’s secret. And it better be okay to do that because he’s revealed his secret to everyone already. That saint, that angel-face, Angelo, he has almost nothing to hide, if not nothing at all.</p><p>Continuing from my last anecdote, no, I never got my Warrior induction ceremony, but I did get my Warrior induction. The other Warriors, they told me that the reason why I was out for so long was that they thought I was dead. They found the cave the Empress and I got lost in so many years ago and discovered my chewed-up, soiled clothing in a pile of Demonpillar feces.</p><p>So they thought I was dead, and they didn’t even go tell anyone.</p><p>That’s okay, I guess.</p><p>This story took place probably five years ago. I was fifteen and a full-fledged Warrior, and that meant I was outside the village almost all the time.</p><p>So the Empress, she was with Amica, or with Angelo, or training with her sword, or all three at once.</p><p>And me, I was out chopping wood and gathering rocks almost every night, and I wouldn’t be back until all the orphanage kids were asleep.</p><p>For some reason, I’d go pretty far from the villagers and the other Warriors whenever I did my work. It was either I was far from them, or they were far from me. For longer and longer hours, I was on the other side of the bridge, scouring the forests of Medius, making sure that no Divine Knights were coming. It was better than doing nothing, sitting around when people didn’t want me here. People didn’t like fish that much anymore.</p><p>Aside from the stars, what got me back home were the drawings etched into the ground. Drawings of Ogres and Goblins, of swords and claws, trailed the rims of the dirt path, from the riverbank all the way to the giant wooden bridge.</p><p>And, of course, the only one who could’ve made those drawings was the Empress. Because I was with her when she made them in the first place.</p><p>The riverbank I passed by every night, it was the same riverbank where the Empress and I played stick-fight when we were little. The difference was that, at that point, the Empress was actually fully capable of killing someone with a blade. And she wore shoes and a dress. And she stopped getting grounded.</p><p>This one time, after I finished my job for the night, carrying my axe, I was walking along that riverbank. In the thick, hard dirt, I saw some faded marks forming into the hilt of a sword. The tip of the blade ended at a small, eroded rock, which happened to be perfectly sized for the toes of my sandals.</p><p>So I kicked it.</p><p>Launching from the tip of the sword, the rock landed on the belly of a nearby, crudely-drawn Ogre. Dust rose as I kicked it again, and it crushed the Ogre’s ugly face. I kicked it a few more times, taking in the thud of my sandals against the rock, the rock against the dirt, bouncing and rolling over the dull strokes forming coarse Goblins, Demonpillars, and claws. The rock, it skidded over stick-figure armies, the coiling necks of dragons. It skewed over giant blocky drawings of Warriors and fighters before landing on the face of one of them.</p><p>I stopped kicking once I heard the soft swish of sand under my feet. I took this opportunity to look over the river, see my reflection in the water. The reflection, it had the scales on my chest coming from my father. It had the round, chiseled face coming from my mother.</p><p>And me, I was their successor, who never realized that one day I’d fail them, hard. Harder than when they failed to protect the Oracle all those years ago because I failed to protect the entire village from the wrath of the Divine Knights. Because I failed to protect the kids from the orphanage. Because I failed to prevent Amica from getting kidnapped. Because I failed to protect the Empress.</p><p>That’s later, though. Much, much later. Not here.</p><p>I was looking at my reflection in the river using whatever scarce moonlight there was when I heard some rummaging in the bushes. I dropped my bunches of wood and rocks, had my axe primed in front of me. In my mind, I said, “Who’s there?” In actuality, I said nothing.</p><p>On my left ear, the chirping of cicadas. On my right ear, the rushing of water. In my hands, the heavy wooden handle of my axe.</p><p>I turned to face the source, somewhere behind the hardy masses of trees, and I took one step closer. And then another. And then another, stepping on the face of a Goblin. And then another, crushing the face of a dragon. And one final step, the eroded rock poking the sole of my foot.</p><p>I had my axe ready to swing down over my shoulder when I noticed the light aura.</p><p>The small, light aura, crowded around by dark leaves and tree trunks, it whisked around the hidden clearing, bursting into smaller spheres of light. Then it dove into the ground, disappeared behind the dark flora, and rose in front of the Empress.</p><p>And I knew it was the Empress because she started whisper-yelling, “Milo!” She whisper-yelled, “Milo, come here!”</p><p>And I whispered back, “Where’s that light coming from?”</p><p>For a moment, the Empress and the light did nothing, the two of them only a forward step away from each other.</p><p>“Milo,” she said, “come on, get over here!” She pointed at the light and said, “Angelo wants to show you something.”</p><p>From behind the brush, the barely pubescent voice of a scrawny kid blurted out, “Wait, no I don’t!”</p><p>And me, lowering my axe to the side, I said, “Oh.” I said, “So it’s just you and Angel-Face here, huh?”</p><p>The light aura weakened as Angelo took hold of it. After taking a closer look, I saw that it was really coming from the white rose. That rose, it still retained its fresh look from years ago, from when I first saw it on the Empress’s tenth birthday. Unwilting. Eternal.</p><p>The Empress, sitting on a log, scooted over and patted the space next to her. “Come on,” she said, “sit with us. We’ll go home together later.”</p><p>So I sat.</p><p>And Angelo, sitting on the log opposite to us, he had the white rose in his hands. Actually, it wasn’t <i>in</i> his hands; it was <i>floating</i> between them. The rose, it spun around and around, gaining speed until it formed a glowing, miniature tornado. Small, white wisps started spitting out from its head in all directions.</p><p>My vision teetering from the tornado to the fleeting wisps, I asked, “So you’re a magician?”</p><p>And with the light aura illuminating his angel face, Angelo said, “Milan.” He said, “Please don’t tell anyone you ever saw this…”</p><p>It’s funny because he and I never did keep that promise.</p><p>Angel-Face stretched out his hands, caused the rose to gradually stop spinning and maintain equilibrium before he relaxed them again. Looking down at his feet, Angelo softly said, “You’re one of the only people who know about this.”</p><p>The Empress, kicking her legs against the grass, said, “He told me it got enchanted in Marlayus or something.”</p><p>“Uh-huh,” Angelo replied, extending his arms. “I’m skinny as heck and I can’t fight to save my life, and we knew that the Divine Knights would raid my village someday, so…”</p><p>His face turned a little pink as he put his arms back down. I guessed he was looking at my axe so I kicked it to the side. “I see,” I said. “You mind showing us what else you can do with that, Angel-Face?”</p><p>And Angelo mumbled, “It’s getting dark…”</p><p>And the Empress cried, “Just do it!”</p><p>So Angelo, he waved his hands at us, told us to move back a little. He mumbled something like, “Fire might burn the whole forest, wind might make us high…” He mumbled, “Lightning might cause a fire, poison might kill us…” And then, finally, he clapped his hands together, whispered something into them, and the floating rose’s petals suddenly shot out, sharpened like spines. Sharpened like ice shards. Glowing with a light aura, and sparkling, too.</p><p>And for me, shit, it looked just like frostbite.</p><p>Angelo put his palm directly under the stem of the white rose, the rose floating above it. He gulped down a lump in his throat. “I just realized,” he said, shivering, “if I tap this on the plants, we and the whole forest might freeze up.” Then he looked at me and said, “Milan, is it okay if we use your axe?”</p><p>I looked back at him and said, “What?”</p><p>Then he said, “I, uh, don’t know how to make it go back to normal unless I use it on something.”</p><p>And the Empress whisper-yelled, “Put it on my arm!”</p><p>On my left ear, the chirping of cicadas. On my right ear, the rushing of water. In my hands, without realizing it, the heavy wooden handle of my axe.</p><p>Angel-Face said, “I promise.” He said, “I’ll try to make it stop at the blade.”</p><p>So I held my arm out, my hand clutching the axe, the blade pointing at the white rose. And I heard the light clink of shards hitting metal.</p><p>For a moment, the edge of the blade glowed with a light aura.</p><p>It was so quiet I realized I was the one breathing the loudest.</p><p>And then, the white ice engulfed the entirety of the blade of my axe.</p><p>Me, my dumbass, I wasn’t moving at all. The ice, it trailed down the wooden handle, forming jagged, shiny edges all around it. The warmth slowly seeped out of my fingertips.</p><p>And Angelo, he was sweating, hard, with his arms outstretched and his hands strained and his mouth desperately stammering some chant.</p><p>And the Empress, that girl, she was snapping her fingers in front of me. “Milo?” she said.</p><p>I didn’t flinch.</p><p>She clapped her hands right in front of my nose. “Milo, let go, please!”</p><p>On my left ear, the pleading of the Empress. On my right ear, the rambling of her future fiancé. In my hand, the heavy, frozen-over, wooden handle of my axe.</p><p>Then I let go and the axe shattered upon impact. The ice quickly melted away, and the illuminating liquid bled into the ground.</p><p>Angelo dropped to his knees and the now-normal, unwilting white rose did, too. He let out a heavy, unstable breath. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking, breathing hard. “I-I’ll buy you a new one, I promise—”</p><p>And me, I said, “You don’t have to.” I shook my head and said, “It’s okay.”</p><p>I felt the warm hand of the Empress on my back. She motioned for Angelo to come over, too, and she hugged him. The poor guy still shook.</p><p>Angel-Face said, “I could’ve killed you.” He clutched onto the Empress and said, “I could’ve frozen you up. Shit, I’m sorry—”</p><p>And in an effort to calm the guy down, to calm me down, for the first time in a long while, I reached into the depths of my throat for some clean and unburnt words. And when I fished for the memories that once made me happy, they came tumbling out, not in my favor, but his. I said, “Maybe the kids at the orphanage would like to see that rose.”</p><p>And that, that changed everything.</p><p>I saw the spark in Angel-Face’s eyes, and I knew that what I said, it changed everything for him. For me. For her.</p><p>After a moment, he picked up the white rose from the ground, covered it with his hands so the light aura came back. He was still shaking, but this time he smiled a little. And, gods damn it, it was a genuine smile. The words of the memories burned on my tongue and left it tasting bitter.</p><p>And Angelo said, “Stop.” He said, “Stop and smell the flowers. T-That sounds good, right?”</p><p>In the real world, the Empress and I, we said, “Yup.”</p><p>In my mind, I imagined the kids, instead of the dark leaves, crowding around him. I imagined their excited voices asking him for stories of Marlayus, instead of the chirping of cicadas.</p><p>Holding the unwilting white rose firmly in his hand, Angelo said, “Thank you, both of you.” His face turned pink and he said, “I’m sorry about that again.”</p><p>And the Empress said, “I hope you’re feeling better.”</p><p>And I said, “Yeah, me too.” But it was already obvious he was going to ask me to tour the orphanage the next day.</p><p>And the three of us, we walked home together. Well, the Empress and Angel-Face did, at least.</p><p>Me, I went back to pick up my bunches of wood and rocks, went back to the riverbank, to my reflection in the water. Next to my foot was the small, eroded rock, crushing the face of a crudely-drawn Warrior in the ground.</p><p>I took this rock and kicked it into the water, and it landed square on the face of my reflection.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Chapter 8</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The next morning, when we find the guy, he’s already dead. Actually, before we even get to infiltrate the mines, there are two Pagnas Knights present to greet us at our door. Only two. One of them’s got a hood on, and he has his eyes as fierce as fire, some sliver of hope as fierce as fire, and that makes him stand out from the cold all around. The other one, poor guy, he looks like he’s about to throw himself down the blizzard-ridden mountainside.</p><p>The hopeful Knight says, “Dragonblood, I beg you.” He says, “Please find the captain, no matter what it takes.”</p><p>Me, I already know how this is gonna end.</p><p>The Knight, he knows it too.</p><p>The Witch and the Shinobi, I don’t know.</p><p>The Empress, I don’t know anything.</p><p>So the Empress, the Witch, the Shinobi, and I, we go anyway. Deep into the mines.</p><p>Unlike in Marlayus, somehow, I’m the one leading the charge this time. The screech of the Empress’s sword scraping the icy ground trails behind the rest of us. Far, far behind, and slowly, too. A long, deliberate scar on the land, cultivating right behind us. She gets so far behind that I have to turn around and head back to pull her along by the hand, by the dragon hand. Her sword keeps scraping the ground.</p><p>Actually, it isn’t too bad at first. Oil lanterns hung up on the walls of the ice caverns make it easy enough to see. Too easy to see, in fact, it doesn’t take long for us to find and smell a rotten corpse amongst the snow and ice.</p><p>Actually, upon my first glance at the dead captain at my feet, I think he’s my father. Because his fingers are malformed, molded into stiff, round, black nubs, and his nose is raw with a bright, red rash, and his cheeks are plastered with a sore layer of black, and his ears and his lips are all blackened and peeling off, and all the rest of whatever skin he’s got left are as pale and blue as this killer snow around us.</p><p>And, of course, I can’t forget the shards of ice that are sticking out of his skin, everywhere. Fresh. Sparkling. Like the spiny seed pods a Bombud plant spits out of its mouth.</p><p>After all, the other word for karma, I remember, is “frostbite.”</p><p>I hear a gagging sound from behind me. Next thing I know, the Witch doubles-over her waist and regurgitates a slimy stew of partly-digested apple chunks. The snow eats it up, but the acidic stench remains. The Shinobi takes initiative and grabs her by the shoulders, turns her away from it all.</p><p>This whole scene, it feels a little familiar.</p><p>On one hand, this dead guy, I want to imagine him looking like my father. I rub my hands together and put two fingers to his neck to check his pulse. And I pretend that it’s my father who I’m saving. My father, who intentionally neglected to bring any frost-stopper bones, twenty years ago, to save himself from karma.</p><p>On the other hand, this dead guy, I can’t look at his face. My two fingers on his neck, I’m counting no pulse. My eyes are closed and my head’s turned away from him. No warmth. No pulse. Nothing. I’m still looking away when I swipe my ever-freezing hand across his face, trying to close his eyes if they weren’t already. The cold stings, chills through my fingertips and up to my palm.</p><p>And then I open my eyes to see the Empress hacking away at the wall.</p><p>She gets pretty deep, too. Each slash sends a muted explosion of shards into the air. Heavy, crystal-clear chunks fly out in every direction. No sound to be heard, though. So I squeeze my palms hard to my ears for a minute, feel the warmth slowly surging into them.</p><p>And I hear a burst of ice like the cracking of bones, bones getting trampled under metal boots.</p><p>I blink for a bit. “Lou,” I say, “what the fuck are you doing?”</p><p>She probably can’t hear me, so I walk up to her, barely dodging a large mass of ice along the way. Carefully I put my palms to her ears. Another few slashes shave the ice before her ears turn warm.</p><p>“Lou,” I whisper, “stop.”</p><p>She grunts, but she stops. I look down at her bare midriff—why she’s not covering it in the cold, I don’t know—and I catch sight of a small snowflake before it dissipates.</p><p>I pat her back. “Take it easy, Lou,” I say. “Take it easy for me, at least. We’re going back now.”</p><p>Even with her being in a trance, the Empress still has the instinct to walk over the rancid pile of vomit to join the others. She doesn’t drag her sword across the ground this time.</p><p>The shards of ice, they start proliferating over the guy’s armor. Their points pierce through the fabric and metal too. Shiny. Glowing. Me, too scared to touch the crystals, I call out to the others that we’re gonna have to leave him here.</p><p>While the others are moving ahead, for some reason I decide to linger behind for a bit. I look at the carvings the Empress left on the wall. The messy gashes form jagged, triangular parts bunching together, but nothing really recognizable. At least to me I don’t know what it is.</p><p>Back on the surface, before another avalanche hits, we tell the Knights that their captain’s dead. No sense in hiding it. Somehow, the hopeful Knight takes it much, much better than the other guy. The cynical Knight, poor guy, he turns away and starts sobbing. Quietly. It’s the soft kind of cry where he’s hiding his face from someone he shouldn't have talked to.</p><p>I don’t say it, but I’m thinking, maybe this captain guy was like a father at some point.</p><p>The last thing the Knights tell us is that there’ll be a blizzard warning today, so we stay inside the lodging until it clears up.</p><p>The Witch, still sick with a stomachache, she sits on the lower bunk while the Shinobi gets out his sack of medicine, powders, and ointments.</p><p>The Shinobi, awkwardly lifting the Witch’s robes, he rubs some oil on her midriff, hands her some peppermint leaves to chew.</p><p>The Empress, oblivious to everything, she stands by the Witch’s side, waits for her to hand her a spare scrap of paper. How many papers she’s taken now, I’ve no idea.</p><p>Me, I can’t do anything, so I settle down on a chair by the window, lean my axe against the wall. And I just stare at the frost growing over the glass.</p><p>Lately it seems like all I can do is sit and watch.</p><p>The Empress, cold, unconscious, she takes her bag and dumps its contents on the desk, pushes some of the junk around with her dragon arm.</p><p>And this junk, it includes the unwilting white rose.</p><p>All these months and it’s been in her sack.</p><p>Unwilting. Eternal.</p><p>It should be dead.</p><p>With the quill in her non-dominant hand, she starts scratching away at the page. She does this in almost the same exact way she slashed at the ice wall with her sword.</p><p>A heavy spray of snow smacks against the frosted window.</p><p>The white rose’s about to roll off the table. Still not looking up, the Empress reaches out her dragon arm and grabs it, places it next to the paper. She reaches out her dragon arm and flips upright a small wooden box I haven’t seen since the massacre of our village. The dragon arm, it knocks away some other medicines and cleaning tools and sharpening tools off, but leaves the rose and the wooden box alone.</p><p>From behind me, a voice purrs, “Ah, thank you, Dande.” Next comes a heavy, drawn-out, cold breath. One from the Witch. One from the Shinobi. The last one from me. And none, none from the Empress.</p><p>The muffled howls of the wind outside, if I listen closely, they sound like spirits whispering words of regret.</p><p>I’m thinking, this possession shit is really starting to get to me now.</p><p>In my mind, I’m praying, please, someone say something other than just breathing all the time.</p><p>The Empress opens her mouth to take a breath and I almost scream.</p><p>Another burst of snow strikes the window and I hear a crackling sound from somewhere. For a moment, it seems like it’s the glass about to give in, but it’s actually the Witch striking her wand in the air like a match. A small, but growing flame emanates from the tip.</p><p>This would have been a fire hazard had the Shinobi not grabbed an oil lamp from the ceiling and given it to the girl.</p><p>The two of them take and light more lamps from the ceiling, place them around the room. The Empress’s dragon arm looks hungry so the Witch neglects to put one on her desk. With the bright lights behind her, the Empress, her face looks darker and more dead than ever.</p><p>After the brief commotion, the spirits stop whispering.</p><p>I’d have put my hands to my ears to double-check, but with the warmth in here I don’t need to.</p><p>I’m kind of wrong. There’s no real fire. All the flames inside the oil lamps aren’t real fire. Small, yellow wisps shoot out of them in all directions, but nothing flammable catches fire.</p><p>It doesn’t take long for the Witch to be up and around again. She tosses her robes over the bony shoulders of the Shinobi, and the two of them sit on some big pillows on the floor, in front of the lamps. And there’s me on a chair on the far end.</p><p>The Witch starts humming, softly. The crackling of the fire and the globs of snow on the window, that’s her percussion.</p><p>I’m secretly hoping the Empress will join in, too. Just like old times.</p><p>From the corner of my eye, I notice that, somehow, the white rose doesn’t have its light aura. This means that I don’t have to look at a dead face.</p><p>I’ve been seeing a lot of dead faces lately.</p><p>It gets easier, but there’s one I can’t look at.</p><p>In my mind, I’m wondering if touching the blade of my axe on one of the flames would make it combust.</p><p>Finally, the Witch raises her voice and says, “Milly.” She says, “Milly, after the blizzard’s over, could Dan and I head over to the local market later?”</p><p>I’ve been relying on the Witch so much lately. I tell myself that she’s doing her best. I tell myself that she tells herself that I’m doing my best.</p><p>I ask her, “Why?”</p><p>The Witch replies, “A lot of things.” She waves her fingers around and says, “I want to get warmer clothes for Dan and Alouette, then maybe I’ll check out some books…” She lets out a long, droning note, and then she says, “We’ll need frost-stopper bones.”</p><p>And I say, “Oh.”</p><p>The Empress scratches away at her paper, the paper being bordered by her dragon arm, the unwilting white rose, the wooden box, and herself.</p><p>The one face I can’t look at, I convince myself, is hers. The Empress’s.</p><p>The thought of seeing her dead body, her dead face, I might as well give myself the same fate as my father, right now.</p><p>There’s shuffling from the pillows as the Witch cuddles up with the Shinobi. “Some kinda-tall guy in orange-black robes and glasses,” she tells me. “He told us the Pagnas Knights need help gathering ice for their weapons.” She puts a finger to her lips and adds, “I heard they’re enchanted!”</p><p>“Enchanted,” I say, “right.”</p><p>It’s always like this. They send some guys out to get killed fighting for the kingdom, then they send even more guys out to get more materials to make more weapons to get more guys killed. It’s always like this. It’s always possible to die in the middle of it all.</p><p>I’m thinking, maybe it’s not true, but maybe my father died just because he was sent out to get ice.</p><p>“So what do you think?” the Witch asks.</p><p>I’m thinking, I don’t actually know how my father died.</p><p>“Milly, can Dan and I go to the market?”</p><p>I’m thinking, no one ever told me exactly how and why he died.</p><p>“Milly, are you even listening to me?”</p><p>I’m thinking, maybe I’m not that much different from those people after all.</p><p>The Witch says, “Milly.” She says, “Milly, I wanna go to the market.”</p><p>I realize my head’s propped against the freezing window, so I swing my head around and say, “Go ahead.” Where I’m looking at isn’t outside. Me, I’m looking at something flammable. I’m looking at the small wooden box with a flower engraved on the cover, bordering the Empress’s paper.</p><p>The Witch asks, “Go ahead?”</p><p>“Go ahead,” I reply. “The fire isn’t too bad.”</p><p>“Fire?”</p><p>“The blizzard. I meant the blizzard,” I say. “It’s clearing up now, probably.”</p><p>Maybe I’m kind of wrong. If enchanted ice can inflict frostbite, then maybe enchanted fire can burn.</p><p>“Well,” the Witch says, “if that’s the case, then we’ll see you later, Milly.” Then she adds, “… And you too, Alouette.”</p><p>A few steps later and now the Witch and the Shinobi are out of the lodging.</p><p>Now it’s just me and the Empress.</p><p>I think.</p><p>It’s just me and the Empress and the enchanted fire and the oil lamps and the white rose and the wooden box and the scrap of paper and the frozen-over window.</p><p>I think.</p><p>My body tells me it’s lukewarm. My heart tells me it’s cold.</p><p>The Empress tells me nothing.</p><p>But the wooden box tells me something.</p><p>Leaning forward, towards the desk, towards the Empress, I ask her, “Lou, can I see that box real quick?”</p><p>I know she won’t reply so I take it anyway.</p><p>The first time I saw the wooden box, it was in her soft, clean hands while walking into the village on the day of the festival. It eventually ended up in my hands and it’s in my hands right now. What I remember is she was shaking so much she couldn’t carry it properly as we passed by long trails of blood. As we passed by Angelo’s face crushed under the rock. As we passed by rows and rows of dead Warriors with her dead father, the dead Chief, at the end.</p><p>Everything, I remember, about the Warriors and all, was part of an orderly execution, except for the orphanage kids and Angelo and the collateral destruction and the fire afterwards.</p><p>The wooden box, it stayed clean and not red the whole time.</p><p>I could’ve thrown it into the burning orphanage’s remains and both the Empress and I wouldn’t have had a burden to carry.</p><p>For some reason, I remember, it was very light.</p><p>It was just a small box but that small box had Angelo’s engagement ring in it. Or marriage ring. Or something. Just that it had to be for him. And she’s kept it, untouched, up to this point, as a memento for him. That’s what I thought.</p><p>The box in my hand, I’m looking at the flower engraving on the top. It’s obvious why it’s there. The flower, it’s a rose shape, but it’s wider and looks nothing like the unwilting white rose on the desk right now.</p><p>I look over at the paper the Empress’s still drawing on. She’s not hacking away at it anymore. She’s standing straight with only her back and head very slightly bent forward for a straight angle at the page. Her non-dominant hand, it’s holding the quill straight down, her thumb and index finger pressed together so hard on the stick they’ve gone white. The way she’s drawing the rose on the page, the lines are angular and jagged, the cultural Dragonblood style. The rose on the box is rounded and curved and wide.</p><p>There’s no way she could’ve made that box. It’s too neat and round and Divine-Family-looking. It had to have been pressed. Where we lived, there was no other Dragonblood village for forests away.</p><p>The enchanted fire from the oil lamps continues spewing out wisps.</p><p>What I remember is, she didn’t have a ring before she left on her little trip to the nearby Celestial village. She left for negotiations. Peace negotiations with the Divine Family. She was away for three days. That’s what I was told and that’s what I remember.</p><p>The Empress had no ring.</p><p>Angelo had no ring, either.</p><p>When she came back, the Empress had a ring and Angelo was dead.</p><p>The Empress dips her quill in the ink, leaves it there and rests her left hand on the desk. There’s the ring on her finger. The shining gold-and-silver ring, with its angular and jagged cultural engravings all around its surface, I’m thinking there’s no way some Celestial worshipper could’ve made it without getting executed. With a shivering hand, I thumb the two metal ring earrings on my left ear.</p><p>“Lou,” I ask, “mind if I open this?”</p><p>A familiar rumbling sensation builds up on the floorboards.</p><p>There’s no way this could be right. Angelo’s spirit was wearing a ring in Asura Gate.</p><p>“Lou,” I say, “I’m going to open this.”</p><p>The Empress, with her face shadowed over, she makes no sound.</p><p>Me, right now, I could toss the box into the enchanted fire, let it burn up, and both the Empress and I wouldn’t have a burden to carry. We’d have one less thing to carry. One less thing to carry for Angelo.</p><p>But I open the box anyway.</p><p>And there’s no way this could be right, but when I open the box, it’s empty. It’s fucking empty.</p><p>A thundering avalanche rages past, slamming clumps of snow against the window, and with it come the whispers of the spirits again.</p><p>“Lou,” I say, “Lou, you made your ring, didn’t you?” Placing the box back on the desk, I say, “The ring on your finger. It’s supposed to be Angelo’s, isn’t it?”</p><p>The whispers turn to shouts turn to howls as the avalanche rages on.</p><p>“You never got your ring,” I breathe. “You never got his ring to him either.”</p><p>And the Empress still doesn’t say anything.</p><p>I could open my mouth and start screaming at her, start screaming at the spirits to shut up and let her talk. I could take the ring off her finger and throw it into the fire along with the box and the paper. I could walk out the lodging, not taking any frost-stopper bones with me, and leave her and the spirits and whatever the hell is here, and never come back.</p><p>Instead I tell her to sit down. I gently hold her by the shoulders and push her down to her chair. She doesn’t resist. Then I pull up my chair and sit right next to her, facing her.</p><p>Hunched over a little towards her, I say, “I don’t know if you can hear me, and I don’t care.” I say, “But I want to teach you something. I want to tell you a story.”</p><p>The enchanted fires start to die down. Clouds of mist come out of my mouth and nose as I speak. And the Empress, her head’s tilted forward, and her face’s still dark.</p><p>Picture this as looking like me in the orphanage, like me in the bar, except I’m on a small little chair and the Empress is the now dead-silent audience.</p><p>I tell her how there used to be this little Dragonblood boy who was afraid of the snow. He didn’t know why he was afraid of the snow, but judging from what rumors went about, about who died from the frost, he thought it was best to stay away from it. He should never go to Pagnas. He had many questions but none of them were ever asked nor answered.</p><p>Outside, the howls turn to shouts turn to whispers. The fires stop shooting out wisps.</p><p>Taking the wooden box in my hand, I tell her how this boy used to live in an orphanage in a very sunny village. “He used to be very lonely, but then there was this girl who became his best friend,” I say, “and she did something no one else was able to do. She made him brave.” I say, “She was a wild girl who always got herself into trouble, but she always had fun with it. When he had nightmares about the snow, the boy would just think about her and his fears would go away.” I tell her that the boy thought the snow wouldn’t hurt him if he acted like her, and if he was with her.</p><p>At this point, two of the oil lamps have snuffed out. The air in the room starts feeling cold.</p><p>I tell her the girl and the boy, one time, they were climbing up the waterfalls surrounding their village. The boy was too big, though, so he never got far, but the girl always climbed higher and higher each time. And she slipped each time. But the boy was always there to catch her, and then the two of them climbed down, running back into the village like a couple of laughing runts.</p><p>In my hands, the wooden box feels warm. So I take the Empress’s hand and place it on the box, too.</p><p>I tell her that the boy also liked fishing. Somehow the girl was able to tag along with him. Whenever she did that, the villagers got angry because she was very important to the village and no one wanted her to get hurt. But she never did get hurt because the boy was there, and the boy didn’t feel hurt because the girl was there, too.</p><p>“As many times as the boy saved the girl,” I tell her, “the girl also saved the boy. Because when the boy did something bad to the village Den, the girl was able to convince the village elders to keep quiet and let him stay.”</p><p>Four oil lamps have snuffed out now. My ears, my cheeks, my nose, they feel frozen, but my hands stay warm.</p><p>I tell her that the boy had two secrets. The first secret was that because of what the girl did for him, he gave himself a new name. I say, “He called himself the Warrior of the Empress.” I say, “And no one knew that, not even the girl.”</p><p>When all the oil lamps snuff out, when the room darkens blue and the noise of the avalanche can’t reach my ears anymore, it’s in this moment that I press my forehead against the Empress’s.</p><p>“The second secret,” I tell her, “is that the boy loved the girl.”</p><p>The whispers turn to hums turn to absolute silence.</p><p>I tell her that the boy loved the girl, but when he became a man and she became a woman, he had to leave her and she had to leave him.</p><p>“What the boy and the girl did before that,” I whisper to her, “was they met atop the waterfalls for one last time.” A mist starts clouding my vision and I tell her, “And the boy and the girl agreed that one day they will go to Pagnas together. They won’t enter Pagnas without each other, and they won’t leave Pagnas without each other.”</p><p>I swallow a lump in my throat. “And,” I tell her, “when the boy stops being afraid of the snow, when he stops being afraid of himself, it will be complete. He will be the Warrior of the Empress, and the girl will be the Empress of the Warrior.”</p><p>I stop talking. My forehead pressed against hers, it feels warm. Everything’s fucking freezing cold except for our hands and our heads and I’m thinking, we could die here now. We could both die here right now.</p><p>I take a deep, deep sigh, close my eyes, and say, “Lou.” I say, “I’m sorry.”</p><p>I’m thinking, I’m saying sorry for a lot of reasons right now. This is just one of them. The other ones, I can’t bring myself to say them.</p><p>And then I open my eyes and see tears trailing down the Empress’s cheeks.</p><p>Her face, it still has the same dead expression. But what happens is that first one eye starts shedding tears, and then the other eye does the same a second later.</p><p>A rumbling sensation starts building up on the floorboards.</p><p>The Empress opens her mouth.</p><p>Her breath feels warm.</p><p>And whatever she says in this moment, the noise of the avalanche drowns it out so fast.</p>
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<a name="section0009"><h2>9. Chapter 9</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I’m laying in bed and the Empress’s laying in bed, and it’s just the early afternoon but I’m already drifting off into a distant past. The Witch and her little boyfriend won’t be back until later. Give me time to think. I need it.</p><p>Cushioned by a shitty pillow, my head throbs with the howls of the constant avalanches until I simmer them down to the breezes of my childhood village. Wind. Trees. Our little area in the forest and the sky’s blue, blue, blue as fuck.</p><p>A memory.</p><p> </p><p>The Empress had her sword down with her hands way up on the handle, pointing the tip of the blade at Angelo’s feet. After that, the Empress twisted the pommel off and shot it straight across, right into the gap between Angelo’s eyes. What this was called in Warrior terms was “ending him rightly.” What the Empress called this was “splatting the egg."</p><p>This would’ve been a safety hazard had the weapons not been wooden and unsharpened, just a long wooden block on a handle.</p><p>The wooden pommel went <i>poiiiing</i>, shot clear through the air across the distance of three people, and bounced off Angelo’s nose as he threw himself back. The Empress took this opportunity to seize him with her blade, closing in fast, one big step after another, kicking up dust under her feet and heaving up her edge until stopping right before the neck. For a moment, Angelo just froze in place, his wide eyes staring at the Empress’s sword.</p><p>The Empress smirked. “Bet’cha didn’t see that coming, huh?” she chuckled.</p><p>“No kidding,” Angel-Face said. “I didn’t think that was allowed.”</p><p>This was just one of the ways the Empress made playing dirty fun. Keyword, was. Nowadays, she doesn’t care what she does as long as it kills quickly and painfully. Think splatting the egg versus slicing across the face. Half-swording versus gouging out the eyes. It’s still dirty, but for all the bad reasons.</p><p>Me, sitting on a log, I picked up the pommel from the dirt and tossed it back at her. “It isn’t,” I told them. “Restart. And no egging this time, Lou.”</p><p>“Hold on,” Angel-Face called, “let me fix this up real quick.” Then he took a cool cloth from the woven basket next to me to rub his face.</p><p>The Empress twisted the pommel back on, saying, “Sorry if I hurt you, babe,” and winked at Angelo. Once he was done, the two of them repositioned themselves, standing a distance of three people apart, and went right back to sparring.</p><p>Hunched over, cupping a hand by my mouth, I called out, “You’ve got ninety seconds.” The Empress eyed Angelo. Angelo eyed the Empress. And then, I yelled, “Start!”</p><p>The way Angelo fights, he waits. Maybe he’s pacing around a little, since the guy has wobbly legs. Like in everything he does—opening the door, picking out stuff to buy at the market, checking out some dark cavern, riding his father’s horsearoos—he always lets his girlfriend go first. And since his girlfriend always goes first, he always watches her first. And since he always watches her first, when the Empress went in for the hit, snapping as quick as a Demonpillar’s tail, Angelo pulled his sword out in front of him, and their blades scraped off each other. Again, the Empress rushed on in a flurry, jabbing down at Angelo’s hip and up at his neck, but her blade only met his. The hard thumps of wood-on-wood echoed throughout our little forest clearing.</p><p>The way the Empress fights, it’s like she knows it’ll all be over soon. So go on and end it fast.</p><p>“Sixty seconds!” I called out. Then I stared down at my feet again, counting under my breath.</p><p>What Angelo does is he negates her. Undoes her actions. Lets her repeat but doesn’t really advance himself.</p><p>What I thought back then was, they’re so in sync.</p><p>I gotta admit, all credit’s due to Angelo’s father. He was the one who asked me to supervise them. Not the Chief, though. The Chief, he could only say yes when he saw his daughter’s eyes light up at the suggestion. Part of me understood that Angelo’s dad saved me from getting too far gone. After my botched Warrior induction, the fishhook incident, the fact that the only person I saw regularly was the orphanage director and all, I had nothing better to say but yes, too. That was around two years ago. Ever since then, Angelo got rid of his twig arms and started gaining a bit of muscle. The Empress, she already had quite a bit herself, long before he started.</p><p>“Thirty seconds!” I yelled out. This time I was watching them, but only barely. Maybe I was thumbing the threads of the basket a bit, turning over the stuff in there. Maybe I grabbed a banana or something out of it.</p><p>A loud clash. The Empress and her future fiancé crossed swords right in the middle, and the Empress pushed hard while Angelo pushed back. The two of them in a bind, their arms tensed up as they put all their might into it. The Empress licked her lips as Angel-Face seemed to loosen his grip.</p><p>And then Angelo took the guard of his sword and knocked her blade upward.</p><p>Angelo dropped his sword over his head, ducked down, pushed his head against her stomach, grabbed her by her thighs, and, with a swift move, tossed her right off her feet.</p><p>And, of course, when she fell, he landed right on top of her. Clouds of dust rose around them as they laughed.</p><p>“Ha! I’ve got you!” he joked.</p><p>“Shit!” she spat. “That wasn’t fair! Come on, get off me!” She pushed him off to the side. Already both of their leather training clothes were marred with dirt, and the sun highlighted the sweat on their foreheads.</p><p>“Woah,” I said, putting the basket off to the side. “Okay, alright, I didn’t know you could do that.”<br/>
Angelo dusted off his clothes, readjusted his bandana, and grinned awkwardly. “Aha, I didn’t, either,” he replied. Then he helped his girlfriend up and challenged her, “Let’s go again.”</p><p>The rumor was that the Empress had been training under the Chief’s wing the whole time, but he stopped after an injury she gave him. He didn’t have a peg leg before, and I wasn’t kidding about the Empress’s potential to kill. But don’t take my word for it. I’m not one to want to spread rumors after all the stuff people said about my dead parents. About me.</p><p>The Empress raised her sword, then shook her head and lowered her blade to her side. “I want a fair game, though.” She snapped her fingers at me. “Hey, Milo,” she asked, “that wasn’t allowed either, was it?”</p><p>See, I could be wrong, but Angelo keeps trying to make this a not-so-serious thing. And I can’t really blame him. No one knew what was gonna happen a few months from then.</p><p>Not even a single Warrior.</p><p>Sometimes, I still wonder, if the Empress stayed home that day, if Angelo would still be alive. Or if they would both be dead.</p><p>That’s later, though. Not much later, but later. Not here.</p><p>“Milo!” the Empress cried, tapping her blunt-edge sword against her foot. “Was that fair, or what?”</p><p>I found myself drawing circles in the dirt with my foot. “Yeah, it wasn’t,” I said, scraping my sandal over the doodle.</p><p>The Empress sneered at her lover. “He’s gonna try to kiss me if he does that again,” she joked.</p><p>In response, Angelo put his hands on his hips. “I totally am,” he said.</p><p>What a confident flirt.</p><p>I stood up from the log I was sitting on and grabbed a wooden training pollaxe from the rack, rested it over my shoulders. “Bah, you guys can go fishing for kippers in bed,” I quipped. “I’m giving you a lesson now.”</p><p>Half of me still wonders if the Empress’s swings hurt so much because of me, or because of her father. Or because of whatever’s burning in her heart.</p><p>“I need a volunteer,” I said, pulling my axe down in front of me with a quick swoop.</p><p>Angelo flinched while the Empress raised her hand.</p><p>“Alright, good,” I said, “because this is something the Warriors taught me once.” I turned my grip around so that the blunt end of the axe faced her. “Also,” I said, “think fast.”</p><p>“Huhn?”</p><p>I lightly jabbed the wooden end, the wooden pole, into her chest just enough that it poked between her breasts. From the corner of my eye, Angelo squirmed.</p><p>A smear of light brown wood exploded the pole out of the way, drawing my arms upward. The Empress then pointed the tip of her sword at me. “Next time, Milo, I’m stabbing your balls,” she hissed.</p><p>Then all of a sudden, a white vine-like whip with a light aura shot out from the general direction of Angel-Face.</p><p>My heart skipped a beat since it looked like it came from his… pants. It didn’t. The vine whip, it snapped out from a pouch on Angelo’s side, where he kept the unwilting white rose. It wrapped around Angelo’s arm and launched its thorny self onto the grip of my axe with my arms pulled back and my armpits exposed and the axe pole pointing slightly upward.</p><p>Picture this as the three of us in some awkward triangle position—the white vines, the pollaxe—all connected together and stuck. And the Empress’s sword is aimed at my balls.</p><p>After a long few seconds, Angelo took a good look at all this and said, “Oh, shoot.” He said, “I… I don’t know what this is. I panicked. I’m sorry.”</p><p>But that didn’t matter to me, because the thorns on the vine around my axe, they shot out and glowed and sparkled, just like when Angelo used his ice magic five years ago to shatter my axe. And very, very quickly, in my mind, the words repeated: <i>Milan is it okay if we use your axe I don’t know how to make it go back to normal unless I use it on something I promise I’ll try to make it stop at the blade…</i></p><p>Angelo looked at me, the Empress looked at me, as I yanked my axe down as hard as I could. Yet the vine still clung to the shaft. I tugged it as if it were being sucked into a whirlpool on the seas of Hasta, the vines twisting more and more as I tugged harder with my sweaty hands. My arms, they swerved the axe so hard the blunt end almost popped the Empress in the abdomen, and she jumped out of the way.</p><p>“Milo, calm down!” she yelped.</p><p>“Stuff it, Lou!” I replied. I gnashed on the words as I took a deep breath, got a free hand, dug my fingers into the ice-like vines, and clawed through them.</p><p>Angelo looked at me like a dead man as the vines suddenly softened and, with me drawing him by the vines, he ended up right at nose contact with the blunt end of the pollaxe.</p><p>And then I brought it down.</p><p>Jabbed him square on the face with the shaft.</p><p>As I blew him back, the vines, they sparkled and hardened again, and their thorns shot out so far they cut through the skin of my fingers. I was gonna take my fist and shatter the damn thing, but I looked at my scratched and bloodied hand and did not want to add frostbite to that list.</p><p>Then, in a flash, the Empress took her sword and burst through the hardened vines. The bits and pieces of them fractured and flew into the air. Through the breezing sparkles, Angelo still reeled from the impact. The fragments filtered his face into a mangled painting, staring right at me in shock.</p><p>At this moment, I drew myself forth with the axe, through the fragments clinging to my sweaty forehead, raised the shaft, and bunted Angelo in the face again before pulling back. What was left of the vines retracted into his pouch, and at the same time, his right foot landed on a fist-sized rock and twisted into an L-shape with his foot tilting inwards.</p><p>From where I stood, with the Empress pulling me back, Angelo’s face and ears grew red, him frozen in place with his foot in the bad position. He bit his lip, held his breath, shuffled his leg a bit so as to get off the rock. He turned slightly to his left, away from us, his foot on the ground now, and winced. With his eyes closed and his eyebrows creased up under his bandana, he uttered a quiet, “Fuck.”</p><p>The Empress dropped her sword on the ground and ran to the poor guy, slung his arm over her shoulder to support him up. Me, left behind them, I had my left hand still gripping the axe and my right hand covering my face. The scratches on the latter from clawing, they either healed up very fast, or they were never deep at all. No blood seeped down.</p><p>I took a deep breath and staked the pollaxe on the ground before I rushed to the two.</p><p>The Empress let Angel-Face sit on the log as she set down a dry bamboo mat in front of him. Me, while taking him down by the shoulders, I felt his muscles stiffen, and he let out a series of stuttered yelps as I carried him onto the mat. “Ack,” he cried, “it hurts. It hurts so bad.” He gulped. “It’s really bad.”</p><p>“It’s not that bad,” the Empress said, rolling up a piece of cloth. She placed it under his injured foot, elevating it.</p><p>“No,” Angelo strained, “it’s gonna get worse if we don’t treat it right.”</p><p>We took off his shoe—he bit his lip and closed his eyes again—and it turned out his injured ankle swelled red and purple.</p><p>“Oh,” I said, “it’s actually kind of bad.”</p><p>The Empress grimaced. “Hey, I’m trying to calm him down,” she replied.</p><p>I tilted Angelo’s leg so he wasn’t putting pressure on the sore spot. Trying not to look at him, I called, “Lou.” I snapped a finger at her and said, “Go check if there’s a, what’s that called... a poultice over there, please.”</p><p>“I’m on it,” she said, and turned to the basket on the log.</p><p>Back on the mat, Angel-Face’s foot twitched. “I didn’t get to bring any of mine,” he groaned.</p><p>“No worries,” I reassured him. “I made some of my own.”</p><p>He shuffled. “You what?”</p><p>From off to the side, the Empress fished a banana out of the basket before lifting out the poultice I asked for, along with a cloth bandage. She raised an eyebrow at the goopy green mush, which bled clear through the storing cloth, but shook her head and brought it to me.</p><p>“Actually,” I told her, “just go and bring the whole basket here.”</p><p>Angelo stuttered. “I-I…”</p><p>The Empress planted the basket next to me, and I took the supplies from her. “I’ve got the rest of this, thanks,” I said. Then she nodded and sat cross-legged next to Angelo, watching us.</p><p>I lightly folded the two halves of the poultice together, pinched its cloth by the corners with the goop cupped inside. “It’s good you’ve been studying medicine, future doctor,” I said, not looking at him. Some of the green-yellow oil smeared on his leg as I draped it over his ankle, but he didn’t tense up.</p><p>The Empress took another cool cloth and put it on Angelo’s nose. “Does it hurt a lot?” she asked him.</p><p>Taking the long, dry part of the poultice’s cloth, I tugged it taut and began wrapping it around his ankle. “I’d have used the better herbs from Cadena, like you said,” I told him, “but I haven’t sailed to Hasta in years, you know.” For each wrap-around, the green goop bled less and less. “I hope this one can suffice,” I said. I pressed lightly on the poultice with my scratched hand and felt it cool.</p><p>Once again, this is stuff I found out only after my formal Warrior training. Because he was the one who taught me.</p><p>“Uh-huh,” he mumbled. “Wow, I just…” With his hand on the cloth and the cloth on his nose, he let out a laugh. “Thanks Milly,” he said, “and Al.” A little teary-eyed, sounding a little congested, Angelo asked me, “So what’d you use?”</p><p>I folded a final time for good measure. “Knitbone,” I replied. “A lot of it grows around the orphanage.”</p><p>I didn’t tell anyone this, but in truth, I might have snagged them from the front of Angel-Face’s house.</p><p>“Ah.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s a good one already.”</p><p>When I was done, I wiped my hands off, but the cool sensation remained. Flowing through my scratched hand, from my fingertips to my knuckles and down around my palm and wrist, was a force that freshened it up more than my other hand.</p><p>Across from me, the Empress put her arm around Angelo’s back. “Can you sit up?” she asked. “You don’t want the blood to go down your throat.”</p><p>Angelo nodded and scooted up a bit, put his crumpled cloth to the side. There was blood smeared around it. For a while, I stared at the blood, bright and dark red amongst the white. My fabric that I had to wash later, with his blood on it.</p><p>I waited until he got a new cloth from his girlfriend before looking at him. The cloth covered the lower half of his face, but his eyes smiled at me.</p><p>The Empress yawned, outstretched her arms to the sky and leaned back on the log next to him. Her hair shined a soft orange from the setting sun. “I guess we should chill for the rest of the day, huh?” she said.</p><p>Sitting by them, I rested my elbow on my thigh and my chin on my fist. “Mm, no.” I shook my head. “You. You go back there and train.”</p><p>“But I just sat here.”</p><p>“Go train, Lou.”</p><p>She blinked. “Okay.”</p><p>“Wait, I was joking.”</p><p>But by then she had already hopped from the log, retrieved her sword, and headed off to the side of the clearing.</p><p>Now just Angelo and I on the mat, we scanned the area in silence, watched the Empress return to where I staked the pollaxe, before we got talking again.</p><p>“Sorry about your hand,” Angel-Face said.</p><p>“Sorry about your nose.” I paused. “And your ankle.”</p><p>“It’s okay.” He patted the pouch on his side and exhaled through his mouth. “Al warned me against bringing the rose today, actually.”</p><p>I hunched over. “What,” I asked, “does that thing keep shooting out a lot?”</p><p>“Well, um.” His foot twitched. “You know how the Chief has a peg leg now…”</p><p>I raised an eyebrow. “Was that you?”</p><p>“Not exactly,” he replied, “but I couldn’t help it.” He waved for a new cloth and I fished one out for him. “They were training with real swords,” he said, “and the Chief kept aiming at her feet for some reason.”</p><p>“You’re so damn full of surprises,” I joked.</p><p>“I’m serious,” he said. “That’s what I saw. I panicked and the rose did its thing. Tripped him up, then Al got in with a nasty slice. Now he’s without a leg and it’s my fault.”</p><p>Across from us, the Empress took the edge of her blunt sword, dug it into the ground, and began dragging it around the planted pollaxe.</p><p>I nodded. “So,” I asked, “did he get mad—”</p><p>“Please don’t tell anyone you ever heard this,” he blurted out. Then he motioned for me to come closer and I did. “In a few months,” he whispered, “Al’s planning to make connections with another village…”</p><p>“Dragonblood?”</p><p>“Celestial.”</p><p>“Shit.”</p><p>“Amica encouraged her.”</p><p>“Of course. ‘Keep kindness in your heart and shit in your ass,’ or something like that.”</p><p>“Don’t be mean, Milly.”</p><p>The afternoon wind blew through Angelo’s three angel feathers of hair. “So, take my word with a grain of salt,” he whispered, “but the Chief knows and he’s really scared.”</p><p>I scoffed. “I don’t think he should be.” I took the last cool cloth from the basket and gave it to Angelo, then, shrugging, I helped myself to the banana in there too. “Lou’s really smart,” I told him, peeling, “and really strong. In a lot of ways.”</p><p>He whipped his hand for me to come even closer, my ear right up to his mouth now, and whispered, “He was trying to disable her.” He whispered, “So she wouldn’t have to go.”</p><p>Me, I didn’t think the Chief could have karma too.</p><p>Back to the pollaxe, the Empress held her sword downward, with its flat top on the dirt, and started pounding the ground.</p><p>He stared at her for a second before shaking his head. “It’s been, ah, ten years since I got this magic, and I still can’t control it properly,” he told me.</p><p>“You haven’t used it in a while,” I said.</p><p>“Yeah,” he grunted, “ever since what happened to the Chief.”</p><p>I smirked, glanced at the Empress for a second. “Then stop and smell the flowers again sometime,” I told him, chewing.</p><p>Then Angel-Face looked at me right in the eyes. “I’d rather be a doctor than a magician,” he declared, “if all I can do is cast pretty lights and hurt people.” He sighed. “Then she keeps trying dangerous things, and what if she gets hurt and I can’t help her?” he asked himself. “Or worse? She gets killed!?”</p><p>I clicked my tongue and rubbed the back of my neck. “Man,” I said, “Angelo, you… I used to think the same thing when we were little.” I said, “But I just went along with it and she turned out fine. She takes care of herself.” I took another bite out of the banana. “Better than me, I think.”</p><p>Then a hard <i>tok</i> sound rang out from where the Empress was. She had accidentally hit her sword against the pollaxe, and the pollaxe tilted over slightly.</p><p>“Hey, be careful with that thing!” I called out with my mouth full of banana chunks. “I don’t have enough gold for another one right now!”</p><p>“Then I’ll pay you!” she yelled back.</p><p>“You don’t have to!”</p><p>“You two are so in sync,” Angelo said under his cloth.</p><p>Toned a mixture of orange and purple from the setting sun, the Empress called back, “Is he feeling better?”</p><p>Angel-Face put his two hands behind him and pushed himself upward. “I think I can kind of walk now?”</p><p>“And you guys are so ridiculous,” she said. “Of course I’m not gonna get killed. I choose when I die!” She tapped her sword against her foot, then added, “And that’s not anytime soon.”</p><p>Angelo laughed a little while I stayed silent, chewing the last bit of banana, before forcing a smile.</p><p>She chooses when she dies. No sickness, no monster, no nothing can take that from her. That’s her self-proclaimed, stupid superpower. The same superpower as my father.</p><p>And that’s the one thing that can’t turn out fine. Because that’s the one thing that can hurt her.</p><p>Herself.</p><p>So I turned to Angelo and whispered to him, “Take good care of her.” And he nodded back.</p><p>The Empress teased, “If you can walk, then come over here, my guys.”</p><p>“Alright, alright,” I said and helped Angelo up to his feet, then tossed the banana peel into the now-empty basket. “What are you two planning?”</p><p>“Well, I dunno if she’s planning anything,” he replied, “but I’ll tell you later.”</p><p>Together, with his arm over my shoulder, we approached the Empress standing by the pollaxe. She waved her sword around in front of her, pointed at the ground. “Don’t step into this area,” she instructed.</p><p>With the sun well down below the trees at this point, I said, “I don’t see a damn thing here.”</p><p>“You blind?” she snapped. “I peed here. This is my territory.” After a pause, she whooped. “I’m only joking!” she exclaimed. “I’m not that crazy.” She then turned to Angelo. “Hey, babe,” she said, “I changed my mind. I’m really glad you brought the rose today, because… you know.”</p><p>“Oh, yeah.” Angel-Face took the unwilting white rose out of his pouch, let it float over his palm. “Guess you were right about stopping and smelling the flowers, Milly,” he said. Then the rose, it spun around and around, accelerating, transforming into a small, gleaming tornado with white wisps spitting out of it over his palm, basking his face in white light. With his other hand over my back, next to my neck, his fingers twisted and fluttered around, commanding the wisps to go to certain spots around the pollaxe until the lights illuminated the ground just enough to show the Empress’s new masterpiece.</p><p>It was a giant dirt drawing of a fish, with its hundreds of scales and various fins all detailed by the carefully deep and shallow blows of her sword. Some parts of it—especially the parts separating the mouth from the head, the gills from the body, the eye from the socket—they rose slightly from the land, from the hard dirt. And, at its head, the pollaxe marked its eye.</p><p>The Empress smiled, raised her chin. “It’s funny how it works,” she said. “I know your last-minute gift for me was a fish all those years ago. And, hey, it was real tasty. But if it wasn’t for Angelo, well, I wouldn’t have remembered to make this. So I guess this also doubles as a late and last-minute thank-you?” She rubbed her chin and her cheeks turned a light pink. “You eat a fish and this drawing’s gonna get washed away by the next rainstorm,” she told me. “Nothing lasts forever except the thoughts.”</p><p>I was speechless. I relished in all the care of the artwork, in the fact it was made for me. But I didn’t understand why.</p><p>“Milly,” Angelo said, chuckling, “you look like you’re gonna cry.”</p><p>“What’s this all about?” I demanded. “Come on, I wanna know.” I furrowed my brow and growled, “I’ll make you guys do extra if this is all a prank.”</p><p>Angelo and the Empress smirked. “You really forgot?” he asked. “Because it’s your twentieth birthday, Milly!”</p><p>I blinked. At first, I said, “Oh.” And then I laughed. Despite the darkness, I laughed as loud as I could. “My god!” I exclaimed. “I-I… I haven’t had it celebrated in so long. My god.”</p><p>“Tell you what,” Angel-Face said, “we’ve been planning a party at my place for you tonight.”</p><p>“You are pulling my fucking leg.”</p><p>“My folks aren’t home either, so it’s okay.”</p><p>“My god.”</p><p>The Empress came forth, patted my back. “It’s just between us and Amica who’s coming,” she said.</p><p>“Okay, okay!” I smiled. This time, it wasn’t forced. “Okay, hold on, I need to clean up here first before I head over.”</p><p>“Right.” The Empress took Angelo off my back and supported him instead. “I’m gonna take him home then I’ll come back to help you,” she said.</p><p>“I’ll keep the wisps over here for you to see,” Angelo said. “Just stay safe out there.”</p><p>“Fine by me,” I said. “I’ll see you guys tonight!”</p><p>“Happy birthday!” they said.</p><p>“Yeah!”</p><p>He was so damn sweet. They were so damn sweet.</p><p>He was our friend. He was my friend.</p><p>I don’t know what happened.</p><p>I don’t know what happened.</p><p>I don’t know what happened.</p><p>I don’t know what happened.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0010"><h2>10. Chapter 10</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When I wake up I’m actually still sleeping, but I fell asleep and woke up in the dream. Two in one. This isn’t the first time I slept and dreamt, slept and dreamt again, and woke up all in one go. Call it “fake-sleeping.” When I “fake-woke-up,” the silk cushions of Angelo’s couch ate my ears the way deep snow eats a dead guy. This, plus the heaviness banging in my head, it made Amica’s voice sound like she was saying, “Dur okeh, bay dank somin dot sterk em bodily,” instead of, “They’re okay. They drank something that struck them badly,” and, “Please let them rest.”</p><p>Thanks, Amica.</p><p>I moved my right leg, which was outstretched on the couch, but not much because the Empress and her boyfriend were sleeping right on top of it. Angelo’s ass pressed against my knee, and it took a while and for the Empress to slump off the side of the couch before I managed to pull it out. We all had silk pillows under our heads. We didn’t have the silk pillows the night before, when we were drinking.</p><p>Thanks, Amica.</p><p>Amica kneeled down, petted my head with one hand and grabbed the stone bottle of sake with the other. The way the liquid sloshed around inside meant it was only one-quarter empty. Slowly, slowly, I turned my head to the side and saw three more bottles of sake on the table. All empty.</p><p>Amica put the fourth bottle down in line with the rest. “Amica,” I called through a dry mouth, “Mr. and Mrs. Ros…”</p><p>“Yes,” she replied, “they’re here.”</p><p>“And the Chief…”</p><p>She looked away at a tree root above the entrance to the main room. “He’s here too,” she told me.</p><p>I sat up with my sleeping leg on the carpet, finally. When I looked up, the Empress was still slumped over but conscious and covering her face in the arm of the couch.</p><p>Words fell out of my mouth. I turned to Amica. “This is scandalous,” I said, “for you, especially.”</p><p>“No, it isn’t,” she smiled. “I don’t believe we are in big trouble at all. It is just cleaning that we need to do.” She said, “Nobody got hurt.”</p><p>Angelo still had the wrapping around his sprained ankle and he was the only one still sleeping.</p><p>“And you’re not dizzy?” I asked Amica.</p><p>She went to the other side of the couch to help the Empress up. “I didn’t drink,” she said. She lifted the Empress’s head up with her two hands and rubbed her reddened cheeks. “She barred me from it. She grabbed the bottle before I took it.” To the Empress, she squinted and cooed, “Thank you, Alouette.”</p><p>The Empress mumbled, “Sorry for the trouble, Amy.” She sighed. The fire of her eyes wicked out for a while that morning.</p><p>Angelo didn’t wake up. Leaning on the couch, the Empress stretched out her arm and put the back of her hand on Angelo’s deeply flushed cheek. He had the look of an apple with an angel face drawn on it. “We’re never drinking again, babe,” the Empress whispered.</p><p>“Keep him away from a full bottle,” I said.</p><p>“He drank two bottles,” Amica said, with fingers up.</p><p>The Empress stood up as straight as she could. It didn’t take long. She put one arm on Angelo’s back and another arm under his knees, careful not to bump his ankle, and heaved him up. Amica helped too. They wanted someone sober so I didn’t do anything. They carried him to his room.</p><p>In another room, the Chief said something to Angelo's parents along the lines of needing to keep the heirs away from trouble, and that his daughter will come in to help Angelo sometimes but can’t come in yet because she has a meeting in a distant village she needs to handle soon. Amica, too—she needed to tend to her Oracle duties, and Atruum had more important things for her to do than clean her best friend’s fiancé’s house.</p><p>When I tried to get up, my sandal crushed a piece of already-broken stone and something wet and some sparkles and magic dust floating around.</p><p>A hard leather-gloved hand grabbed and shook my shoulder. I looked up and a man with a thin shadowed-over face and spiky hair stared me down with dark slits of eyes. “You stay and help me clean, boy,” he said.</p><p>It was the housekeeper. I was ready.</p><p> </p><p>The housekeeper worked slow, but his mouth worked fast, mostly with chewing the plant stalk in his mouth. The guy wore gigantic leather gloves and a thick coat as a big fuck-you to the blazing sun outside. When his arms wobbled to pick up some knocked-over shelves and crates, his ripped coat sleeves creased up at his joint till he relaxed them again. In that little opportunity window, his elbows glowed red and his skin paled everywhere else.</p><p>Broomsticks stood upright on the wall like fishing rods in a fishing shack. I picked out the biggest one so I wouldn’t be toeing shards for much longer.</p><p>Most of the time, the guy spent his sweet time on the couch with one hand on his chin and the other on his thigh. Like this, he was smaller than me, but every time he tipped his head down so the stalk in his mouth and his small white goatee popped out of his big black collar, he turned into the fisherman eyeing me—the fish—in a sea of carved and broken rock.</p><p>When I passed by the Ros house that one time to pick out the knitbone, I crouched low to avoid the all-seeing eye of this fisherman guy. I didn’t know he existed yet, but I avoided windows, avoided the cracks in the hard dirt wall that made up the home. Here in the house now, I cleaned behind the shelves still standing.</p><p>“You’re still too big, champ,” he said. “Nice muscle. Wish I had it.”</p><p> </p><p>In his room, Angelo called for the housekeeper to tell him the time. “Water’s bright enough it’s blinding,” the housekeeper replied from the couch. “This isn’t Pagnas. You’ll turn dark.” He asked, “You want my coat?”</p><p>Angelo replied, “I don’t wanna go out.”</p><p>I haven’t finished shoving all the broken utensils and plates into the nice wooden bin, but I was getting close. A step closer to getting out of here.</p><p>Angelo asked, “Does Milly want to go out?”</p><p>“Milly does not want to go out,” the housekeeper said.</p><p> </p><p>“Did you enjoy the party?” the housekeeper asked me suddenly.</p><p>I had my back turned to him. I took a break from sweeping and started putting the Ros medicine cabinet back together. I picked up a little glass jar between my finger and thumb and watched a salamander eyeball swash around the liquid inside.</p><p>I told him, “I think so.”</p><p>It took the whole morning, but the housekeeper got up from the couch, kneeled down next to me, and picked up a jar too.</p><p>“Finally,” I said under my breath.</p><p>“Finally,” he repeated, “you talk to me.” He placed a jar on the shelf and picked another one up. “Kinda surprised none of these broke, are you?” The stalk in his mouth bobbed as he spoke.</p><p>“I’d be surprised if I wasn’t the one who broke everything,” I told him.</p><p>The housekeeper scoffed. “You weren’t.”</p><p>He pulled his head up, opened up wide, and tongued the plant stalk down his mouth. He swallowed loudly. “It helps the throat,” he told me, chuckling.</p><p>Rows of shiny bottles of mushrooms, knitbone, green and purple liquid stared at me. I pushed some back to make room for other tiny jars.</p><p>“You watched the whole thing?” I asked him.</p><p>“Kind of,” he said. “The only time I really minded was when the Ros boy started punching you.”</p><p>I raised an eyebrow. “He punched me?”</p><p>“He hit you in the stomach and laughed when it jiggled.”</p><p>I slapped my forehead and said, “Gods.”</p><p>“Gods indeed,” he replied. Then he nudged my shoulder. “Why are you still here?” he snapped. He pointed a gloved finger at a tubed contraption on the table next to the cabinet. “Go fix up the alchemy table, ‘less you want the Roses to lose their jobs,” he said. “Drain out the alcohol that somehow got in there. Then go finish sweeping, boy.”</p><p>“Yes, sir,” I said, finally.</p><p> </p><p>While I was sweeping and Angelo was sleeping, the housekeeper told me, “You know, he drank two bottles because of you.”</p><p>I said nothing.</p><p>“Mind telling me why you did that, boy?” he pushed. He stood by the kitchen counter, getting a piece of raw beef and some bread he was about to cut for lunch. The ingredients were in a cupboard carved out of the giant tree root that merged with the house.</p><p>I swept. “I wanted to see if Angelo could be bad,” I told him.</p><p>“Everyone’s got a bad streak in ‘em,” the housekeeper said as he started to cut the bread and beef. “You convinced he’s got a <i>little</i> bit of bad now?”</p><p>“No,” I replied. “I didn’t see it.” I paused. “And even if it were true,” I continued, “it was just play-fighting. It’s gotta be.”</p><p>Between the bottom bread slice and the beef, he asked, “Do you think you’re bad, boy?”</p><p>“Yeah,” I said, “I’m bad.”</p><p>Between the beef and the top slice, he asked, “Do you think the princess is bad?”</p><p>“Who, Lou?” I asked. “No, she’s good. She saved the Oracle.” I swept harder. “Good people save other people.”</p><p>“Well,” the housekeeper droned, “aren’t you good because you’re helping me clean? Saving me some work?”</p><p>“I’m obligated,” I spat. “That’s all. Not gonna jump to that conclusion.”</p><p>“You’re obligated to eat this beef sandwich,” he said, and held it to me.</p><p> </p><p>Angelo was going to be sleeping all day. In the afternoon, I answered the door and the Empress walked in with two leather sacks in her hand. “I’m here to help clean,” she told me, upfront.</p><p>“We’re almost done though,” I told her, upfront.</p><p>“Then this is for you,” she said. She forced one of the leather sacks into my hand. The gold coins rattled inside. “An extended birthday present,” she called it.</p><p>The housekeeper yelled from Angelo’s room. “Close the door or flies will get in,” he said. “The Ros boy’s mouth is open. If flies get into the house then flies will get into his mouth.” A moment after I closed the door, the housekeeper said, “Open your mouth, <i>Milo</i>, so you can distract the flies.”</p><p>The Empress bit her lip and an invisible flow of smoke wafted out of her nose. “He knows I’m here,” she grimaced. “I told him a buncha times not to call you that. He never freaking listens.”</p><p>“He never <i>follows</i>,” I corrected.</p><p>Sitting on the couch, she placed the second leather bag on the now-clean, now-bottleless table. I sat next to her because my back started to hurt from scraping out magic dust from the floorboards. She looked left, then right, then got her mouth real close to my ear.</p><p>“It’s been a chore coming here ever since that guy showed up,” she whispered. “He teases too much. It gets on my nerves quick, but Angelo kinda loves him.”</p><p>The Empress had a theory. She told me that maybe Angelo keeps him around to see how good he can triumph over him, over his temptations. “I’d totally freaking lose,” she said. She’d try to say “freaking” instead of “fucking” when she was in the Ros house.</p><p>With my eyes checking for the fire in her eyes, I asked her why the guy decided to stay here anyway. And she said he came from Pagnas and Pagnas folks always seem so stuck up in the sunny spots. “That coat’s a big fuck-you to the sun here,” she laughed. “He’s a big fuck-you to all of us. But Angelo and the Roses won’t take it. Besides, he’s kind of really helpful.”</p><p>“You didn’t answer my question,” I cut in.</p><p>She asked, “Do you like him? I do and don’t. And do.”</p><p>I said, “I do. You trying to make me answer my own question?”</p><p>She thought for a moment, then asked, “Would you forgive him?”</p><p>For no apparent reason, I said, “Sure, if he said sorry.”</p><p>“He’ll tell you himself,” she said.</p><p>When the housekeeper stepped out of Angelo’s room, the Empress announced that she had to leave. Also that the second leather sack was for him.</p><p>“Can’t you stay longer and hang out with Angel-Face or something?” I suggested.</p><p>She said, “I don’t want to bother him.”</p><p>“And you’re okay with bothering me?”</p><p>She said, “Always.”</p><p> </p><p>Me, I had a hunch. It jabbed me in the stomach, burnt my tongue, and flowed out. “Did you ever know my father, Andrew Dougenis?” I asked him.</p><p>“No,” he said. He lifted a crate and set it down. He asked, “Am I <i>supposed</i> to know someone like that?”</p><p>“I was just asking,” I said.</p><p>By then, the ocean of broken stone had dried up. The specks of magic dust had disappeared. The housekeeper, he plopped down on the crate, spread out his thin legs and cupped his gloved hands in front of him. “I’m gonna take a break,” he told me. “You want me to tell you a story?”</p><p>On instinct, I nodded. I asked, “You want a barrel?” but he said that was for me. I sat.</p><p>“I thought only really, really little kids cared about listening to old people at this point,” he joked, even though he wasn’t that old. He paused, then grinned, but not wholly. “You listen good, big champ,” he said. “Listen to me like I’m your daddy.”</p><p>I replied, okay.</p><p>“Don’t think I didn’t hear you and Princess out here in the middle room,” he said.</p><p>Okay.</p><p>His eyes on mine, the housekeeper told a story about his gloves. “My wife made me these gloves,” he said. “Leather on the outside. Wool on the inside. They’re warm, they’re tough, and they get the job done. When my wife died I brought these babies to Pagnas.” He took one of his gloves off and revealed a white hand with blackened fingertips. “You see how big these things are,” he said. “Could fit a baby in one.” He shook the one he took off with his bare hand. “You know what they say about Pagnas. Cold and harsh and shit.”</p><p>“I hate that place,” I said.</p><p>“I hate it too,” he agreed. “I worked for the knights as a fetcher boy, meaning they gave me barely any armor and a bunch of bags because they thought it made me faster. But I also had perks, if you can call them that.” He said, “Like access to the military brothel they built in place of the run-down Pagnas Dragonblood Village.”</p><p>He put his bare hand on his lap and kept the loose glove dangling. I stared at his glove and his hand and his glove again.</p><p>He pulled his blackened fingers up to tug at his big collar. “I went there a few times ‘cause the Northern Federation made me cold-blooded and cold-hearted,” he told me. “I never took my gloves off until I was in bed with a woman. Then one night, I found one of my gloves missing.</p><p>“It was the new girl,” he said. “The youngest one they had. The kind you would go to if you were old and gross as shit, or a baby boy just starting out. I never went to bed with her. I didn’t want to. She didn’t look like she belonged there. And I wouldn’t be surprised if she was quote-unquote ‘taken in’ because she was a Dragonblood like me and you.” He said, “Well, I caught her with the stolen glove in her arms and was about to ask her for it when I noticed two little hands pop out of the opening.</p><p>“She begged for me not to report her. ‘Don’t tell Lulu!’ she said. ‘Don’t tell Lulu. She’ll kill me and kill her.’ And guess what the little champ said.”</p><p>I asked, “What’d she say?”</p><p>The housekeeper closed his eyes. “The little champ said, ‘Daddy-blood.’</p><p>“I didn’t know who the daddy was. But whoever the daddy was was probably gonna murder that poor baby.” The housekeeper chewed his lip for an invisible plant stalk. “Baby had nice white hair. Baby didn’t smell like us. Baby didn’t have horns or scales or nothing, but the fingers looked burnt and cracky.” He said, “Having a mixed baby like that… That’s taboo, but that’s still her baby. So I helped her escape. I let her keep the glove.” He held up the glove he took off once again. “This one’s a replica of the old one. I made it by hand.</p><p>“It worked,” he said, slowly. “At least, when my wife made these babies for me, she said, ‘It sounds impossible, but I made these so you can hold your son in one, and also so your son can hold your heart when he gets big enough.’” And then he got quiet. The room felt warm. “That girl’s probably twenty-ish now.” He looked up at me, like this time the fisherman was watching for the oncoming storm. “A little younger than you,” he said, lowering his voice.</p><p>So I tested him. “I think you meant to say thirty-ish,” I joked.</p><p>“You’re <i>not</i> thirty, boy,” he snapped. “Don’t even look close to twenty-five, big champ. You’re still a big boy but not like that. You’re a big boy the way a big baby is.”</p><p>I squished the leather pouch of gold in my hand. “I’ll bet that baby me couldn’t fit in that glove,” I said.</p><p>“Gimme your gold then,” he taunted, smirking. So I handed it to him. But he said, “Wait, I was just kidding.”</p><p>“We’re both always just kidding,” I told him.</p><p>“You big rascal,” he chuckled, and spat out the invisible plant stalk. Then he took a deep breath, lowering his voice back to what it was before. Slowly. “Pagnas will harden your heart,” he told me. “It’s your job”—he pointed—“to keep it warm.” He sighed. “That being said, I’m leaving and going back there tomorrow.”</p><p>“Already?”</p><p>“Been here for two months already. Yeah, already, I’m going. I’m still working for the knights.”</p><p>“Will we see each other again?” I asked, my tongue burning.</p><p>He looked at me hard and long. “No,” he said.</p><p> </p><p>A little later I said goodbye to him for the first and last time. But before he left the house for good, late at night with Angelo still sleeping and the Roses still away, him standing by the door open so flies can get in, the housekeeper said, “Mills?”</p><p>And I said, “Yeah?”</p><p>And he said, “Don’t forget that sometimes you’ll see demons in your dreams.”</p><p>And, “One day you might be your own demon. As I have.”</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0011"><h2>11. Chapter 11</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the blue night, the giant dragon in my chest flattens over my torso into a huge, burnt, cerulean scar, and my ass sinks into the old mattress. Because my dragon’s suppressed, the rest of my armor’s off too, and my boxers are sticking to my thighs. “Goodnight, Milly,” is the last thing the Witch tells me before she snuffs out the oil lantern on the desk and heads to her spot on the top bunk, above the Shinobi who’s long fast asleep. The two of them, they’re snoring. Together.</p><p>Before this, I carried the Empress from her chair and onto our top bunk. I laid her down with her dead eyes, still open, facing the wall instead of me, then left her without another word.</p><p>The two of us, we’re wide-awake. Together.</p><p>Outside, the globs of snow hurl themselves against the blurry, frosted-over window. With everyone else asleep now, we’re saved from the cacophony only by this glass barrier between us and the world. I get up from the bed, splay and press my hand against the glass as snowflakes crash around it. I press harder so whatever warmth is still left in my hand spreads around the window. Then, slowly, I lift it. What’s left behind is a clear, hand-shaped opening for me to see my reflection for a few seconds.</p><p>The scales on my chest coming from my father. The round, chiseled face coming from my mother. The blue X etched into my face.</p><p>There’s no rock for me to kick into it this time.</p><p>And then the frost eats it up again.</p><p>For a while, I let the cold air surge around my body. I make sure my limbs aren’t touching each other so the warmth doesn’t spread. What I want is for my whole self to be numb, even for a little bit, while I’m still awake. I take a long, deep breath, and the warm gust of air flows out into a rotten heart.</p><p>She’s dead but she’s not. She’s alive but she’s not. How lucky she is to be stuck in limbo.</p><p>What I want is to be like that.</p><p>The chilling climbs from my fingertips to my forearms, from my toes to my calves. I’m satisfied once my body starts shivering because past that point, I might get frostbite.</p><p>Back to my bunk, I take the ragged blanket that’s a bit too small for me and drape it over the Empress’s body. Then I fling myself onto the mattress, stare up at the wooden supports of the bunk bed as my whole self sinks deep, deep, deep. And then, when my body sinks in far enough, I drift off to sleep.</p><p>Not long after I close my eyes, the warmth of the others around me fades away.</p><p>Except for the person on top of me.</p><p>Everything in my vision is painted black, but bent over me, the soft, small body of a woman snugs around my frame. The exposed parts of my body meet only flesh, warm flesh, as if the cold weather meant shit. Her thighs spread open and they press against mine. Her breasts, too, they gummy around my chest despite the roughness of my Dragon Scar.</p><p>Me, sunken into the mattress, I try to lift my arms, but the strong hands of this woman push them down. I try again, and her hands brace down harder. Around both of my arms snake two thick, steel-like cables, clamping and burying them into the bed. I can’t move my arms.</p><p>To this woman, I try to tell her, “Stop.” But at the same time, her wet lips brush against mine. She licks my lips then pushes down on them, her teeth crashing into mine, almost biting. Blood rushes around my head so hard it feels like steam is coming out of my cheeks. My muscles grow rigid. I try to straighten myself out to cast off the stiffening, but it doesn’t work.</p><p>While she’s doing this, while she’s taking her hands and cradling my cheeks, her, kissing me, two more steel cables snake around my ankles and my legs, spreading them apart. The coldness of the cables paralyzes me. I can’t move my legs.</p><p>I swerve my head to try to shake the woman off, the woman I can’t see. To her, I’m yelling, “Stop that!” I’m yelling, “I don’t want this!” I’m thrashing my head for a chance to hit her somewhere and I’m yelling, “Get the hell off me!” Again, I try to lift my arms, lift my legs, maybe, to throw her off, but this time, all four of the cables yank them down, yank them down deep into the mattress. A fifth cable twists around my mouth and holds my head down flat.</p><p>I can’t move. I can’t talk. I can’t run.</p><p>With the steel cables holding me down, she starts pulling down my boxers. My heart palpitates in my ears and the world starts spinning. Hot air blasts through my nostrils, and this woman, myself exposed now, she starts grinding herself against me. Her finger tracing down my neck, she leans in on me, puffs of hot breath boiling against my face.</p><p>Soon the dark haze clears out, and I’m met with dead crimson eyes.</p><p>Sweat drips down my face. Her short, white hair brushes against it, pools down around my ears and my cheeks as she leans even closer into me. She’s grinding me down there, hot and wet, and I’m staring up at her, at her slitted red eyes and the fucking scar on her face, as she tells me, “How dare you rob?” She tells me, “How dare?” I’m hyperventilating and the air rushes from my nose in and out in and out, and, smiling, she whispers, “Close your eyes, Milo, close your eyes.”</p><p>With my teeth biting down on the metal, I’m screaming.</p><p>Then I look down for a second and it turns out it’s not metal at all. It’s a dragon, a lot of dragons, coiling around me.</p><p>I’m convulsing and thrashing my limbs around to no avail, and she’s grinding down on me and I’m sweating and my heart’s about to burst out of my chest. Then she tilts her head upward, lets out a sigh, and digs her face into my shoulder.</p><p>I take this opportunity to look at the other bunk, and, despite my mouth covering, I try to scream for help. Each cry induces no reaction from the Shinobi nor the Witch. As my vision adjusts, I see that the bunks across from us are empty.</p><p>The Empress, she’s gasping into my ear as she goes. Faster. And I’m pulsating. The dark haze paints over my vision again, but I still feel her on top of me.</p><p>At this point, I give up. I try to, at least. I close my eyes and let her go, and the world keeps spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning…</p><p>But when the ravaged face of Angelo emerges from the darkness of my vision, when his destroyed face gets lit up by the unwilting white rose in his palm and the words, “How dare you rob?” repeat in my head, in my head, in my head, and I see him and the Empress together when none of this bullshit ever happened yet and he’s still alive and she’s still alive and they’re kissing, and then they turn around and look at me and bring their arms out at me and call out my name, call out, “Milan,” and they’re smiling at me, both of them, both of them and only them and me and I’m sweating and I’m sinking and the dragons are pulling me down, then fucking hell, I can’t take it anymore.</p><p>I gnash hard on the steel dragon in my mouth, dig my canines into its snakelike body, until some dark liquid squirts out. And to my side, its head screeches up into the heavens.</p><p>I can’t see a thing, but the cool, metallic sensations around my arms and legs and mouth start to slide away, freeing me. My muscles tense up so hard that upon release, my arms come together, grasping onto the Empress’s shoulders, and throw her forth. I feel her body sink into the bed.</p><p>And then I no longer feel the mattress on my back.</p><p>My hands grip onto her shoulders, hard. Sweat drips off my face as I’m yelling at her, “Stop it!” I’m yelling at her, “Please, stop it! Stop it, Lou!” Her arm swipes against my face, so I take my hand and shove it down above her. “Stop it!” My voice cracks and I’m screaming, “Stop it!”</p><p>Under me, she’s thrashing, gasping. And then she stops moving. Me, holding her down, her legs are spread apart and my thighs are pressed against hers. My chest, my Dragon Scar, it rubs against her breasts. The two of us, we’re churning out dead souls with each scalding breath.</p><p>And then I also stop moving. Because I was grinding into her.</p><p>After a moment, the Empress pulls my head down to her, and she sighs, “How dare you rob?” Weaker, she sighs, “How dare?”</p><p>Then I open my eyes and see the ravaged face of the Empress, her scar reopened, and her black blood pours over my face.</p><p> </p><p>What I’m busy telling myself in the middle of the night is she’s going to come back. She’s alive. Lying down on my side on the lower bunk, looking at the wide-open door of the lodging, feeling the cold air blasting through and watching the snowflakes and hail slam into the flooring, what I’m busy telling myself is she’s going to be okay. She’s still alive.</p><p>What I’ve been thinking this whole time is, this was going to happen sooner or later.</p><p>And, this is real. This time it’s fucking real.</p><p>My teeth chattering and the cold biting at my ears, I’m realizing there’s something shiny and crystal-like blooming over my arms and legs. The frost is climbing up to my forearms and knees. I can’t feel my limbs but I can feel my neck, so I look across from me, through the clouds of my breath, and see snowflakes landing on the Witch and the Shinobi too.</p><p>What I’m thinking is we’re all about to get frostbitten.</p><p>What I’m thinking is this is all my fault.</p><p>Springing from my bed, my armor and the blue dragon in my chest reforming, I barely hear my bones and joints popping, cracking. My nose is frozen raw and breathing feels like choking on fire. I swing my left leg over the bunk, swing my right leg over the bunk, turn my whole self around and stumble onto the wooden floor. My eyes are switching from the desk to the Witch to the Shinobi to the open door to the frost climbing up my limbs to the desk again. What I’m looking for is a bag of medicine.</p><p>What I’m looking for is a lifesaver.</p><p>Through the dark haze in my vision, I catch sight of a small sack on the desk. Just a sack and nothing else. No paper. No white rose. No wooden box.</p><p>No Empress.</p><p>I scramble over to the desk, grab hold of the sack and fish out a handful of frost-stopper bones the Witch bought just yesterday. I pop one into my mouth and the heat and spice surge down my body as I bite down.</p><p>In my head, I’m praying, thank you, thank you. In my head, I’m praying, please, please.</p><p>I see the ice start growing on the Shinobi’s ears, on the Witch’s legs, and I pop frost-stopper bones into each of their mouths, too.</p><p>Neither of them makes a sound. Neither of them makes a move. But the spirits outside are screaming more than ever with each avalanche crashing by.</p><p>Me, I know I’m yelling, “Fuck!” I know I’m yelling, “Fuck!” over and over and over, but I can’t hear it and neither can the others because our ears are so damn frozen.</p><p>I’m not even gonna bother heating up their ears. I’m not even gonna bother waking them up. I don’t want them to know this is happening.</p><p>What I’m thinking is the Empress is about to have the same fate as the captain.</p><p>What I’m thinking is she’s about to have the same fate as my father.</p><p>She’s going to die of frostbite.</p><p>She’s still alive, but soon she won’t be.</p><p>Putting on my armor and grabbing my axe from the wall, I trudge over to the open door and step out. Outside, the avalanche crashes down so hard its debris is flying all over the place. One spray after another of piercing snow and rock shoots in. Me, clutching the handle, I’m pulling the door as hard as I can before the ice snaps and I slam it shut.</p><p>Quickly, I step out of the way and move deeper into the cave, away from the avalanche. My back’s pressed against the wall and I’m looking left and right, trying to find whatever footsteps the Empress left behind, but by now all of that’s been covered by the snow.</p><p>The spirits start howling into my ears, and I’m yelling, “Shut the fuck up!” Sucking in a harsh gust of air, my eyes darting from the dark cave to the avalanche to the frost on my shoes, I’m yelling, “Just tell me where she is!”</p><p>And then I see the deep, deep, jagged gash on the icy ground, heading into the cave.</p><p>A long, deliberate scar on the land, cultivated by no other, cultivated just a day before.</p><p>And fuck if I know the Empress might’ve done herself in the faster way by jumping into the avalanche.</p><p>It’s dark and right now it’s darker than ever since all the oil lamps on the ice walls have been snuffed out, too. On one hand, I’ll find her not too far away, just in time to hand her a frost-stopper bone. On the other hand, I’m thinking it won’t take long for me to find and smell a rotten corpse amongst the snow and ice.</p><p>Facing the cave, facing the darkness of the unknown inside, I take one step closer. And then another. And then another, chewing down on the frost-stopper bone in my mouth. And then another, shaking the frost off my feet. And then one final step, landing on the face of a crudely-drawn Tough Chick in the ground.</p><p>I know it’s a Tough Chick and I know it’s a drawing because the oil lamps on the walls suddenly flare up again.</p><p>I freeze, my axe primed over my shoulder, and look farther into the cave. One by one, the fires of the oil lamps reignite. They form patches of light along the ice walls, getting smaller and smaller the deeper they go. And highlighted under each patch, scratched into the ice, are drawings of monsters.</p><p>Dead monsters.</p><p>Deeper into the cave, red eyes start popping up all around. The sounds of tapping and scratching on the ice get closer and closer. Under the patches of light are the giant, shiny, yellow backs of Thundertoads. In the air are the clouds of hot breath from Flygolins. Through the piles of snow approach Battle Crabs, and somewhere around me I hear the low buzzing of phantom-like Cloudfish about to lash out.</p><p>Under the patches of light, across each of the beasts’ faces are fresh, clean scars.</p><p>I see this and I scream, “Which one of you fuckers took her!?”</p><p>And all of the monsters scream back in time with the rumbling of the avalanche.</p><p>A Tough Chick screeches and lunges at me, its sharp teeth aiming for my head. It misses and I kick it out of the way, only for three more just like it to start coming at me.</p><p>On the ground, the drawing shows to slash my weapon across all four at once, severing each of their maws in half.</p><p>And when the four come at me a second time, I do just that.</p><p>Yellow blood spurts out of their bodies as they scream. Their separated heads and jaws fall to the ground in a wet, gory pile.</p><p>Then I clamp my teeth down on the frost-stopper bone and the spice surges down my boiling blood.</p><p>Right here and now, me, I’m a monster out for blood, churning out puffs of dead souls with each breath.</p><p>Priming my bloodied axe, charging forth, I scream, “Who’s next!?”</p><p>Two Cloudfish manifest themselves to my right and to my left. The drawing in the ice tells me to strike at them right in their cores, blowing them up.</p><p>So I do.</p><p>I slice my axe straight into them and their jelly-like covers explode, landing on the floor, landing on my armor, exposing their ghoulish cores. Their insides dry up as they disintegrate and I crush their corpses under my feet.</p><p>Farther into the cave, more oil lamps start reigniting.</p><p>Farther into the cave, the howls of the spirits get replaced by my roars.</p><p>I’m screaming, “Where is she!?” at the Thundertoad lifting its electric belly from the ground. The drawing is telling me to slice open its stomach so I do and I don’t even wait to see what comes out before I bolt out of the way.</p><p>I strike at the Flygolin hurtling towards me.</p><p>I stomp on the Battle Crabs snapping at my feet.</p><p>I crush the head of a Goblin against the ice wall.</p><p>I do all these things because the drawings say so.</p><p>And all of their faces, they already have scars on them.</p><p>I’m sprinting farther and farther into the cave. More and more oil lamps start lighting up and more and more scar-faced monsters scream and die. My face, the X on my face, my hands—my whole body starts getting hot. The spice from the bone makes my mouth bitter as I suck in the cold air.</p><p>When I reach the point where there are no more creatures assaulting me, I plant my feet on the ground, plant the blunt end of my axe on the ground, and turn around.<br/>
Behind me are bright patches of light, trailing so far back I can’t see the outside anymore. Behind me are the dead bodies and bloodshed of so many monsters I can barely recognize.</p><p>Once I settle down my breathing, I realize it’s quiet.</p><p>I realize it’s warm.</p><p>Something in the air is making things warmer.</p><p>Lifting my axe, I plod my way through the snow. Actually, there’s less snow as I move forward, revealing the clear-cut gash on the icy floor. I follow it until it ends off sharply.</p><p>Then I step in something slimy and smell a rotten corpse, and now I’m back at the same place where we found the captain. The faint light from the lamps reflects and shines on the tips of the ice shards sticking out of his body.</p><p>Where I am, aside from the oil lamps behind me, everything is pitch-black dark. I exhale a few heavy breaths and the rough, hot air scratches my nostrils.</p><p>Where I am, here, I’m waiting. I put my head down and take in the stench of the fresh blood on my body, and here, I’m waiting.</p><p>In my head, I’m praying, thank you, thank you. In my head, I’m praying, please, please.</p><p>In my head, I’m pleading, please, please. In my head, I’m pleading, please don’t be dead, Lou.</p><p>In my head, I’m pleading, please be alive.</p><p>Please.</p><p>And at the same time, I feel a warm essence slowly build up around me.</p><p>That’s when I look up and see a light aura in the center of the area.</p><p>The light, it’s crowded around only by sharp masses of rock and ice. Before the brightness hits me, I scramble behind one of the landmasses and hide there, sitting in the killer snow around me.</p><p>I move my head up a bit and see how this light aura’s getting brighter. It’s getting so bright the rough, colossal pillars of ice are shining crystal-clear, even the ones so far deep in the cave. The stalactites overhead are shining too.</p><p>And I know the light’s still getting brighter because I start to see people-looking shadows grow on the ice wall.</p><p>The first shadow, it’s holding up something that looks like a sword before it lowers it down into a sheath.</p><p>The second shadow, it has something that looks like hair sticking up like angel feathers.</p><p>Me, I’m sitting behind this mass of rock, clutching my axe and biting the bone and sucking in the lukewarm air, and I’m thinking, this is just my very, very late punishment.</p><p>And then I hear the very, very familiar voice of someone I don’t want to remember saying, “Let’s stop and smell the flowers.”</p>
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<a name="section0012"><h2>12. Chapter 12</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Here, the light aura’s reached the brightest it can get. Anything that has ice—the stalactites, the pillars, the walls, the floor—they’re all glowing and shining.</p><p>Fresh. Sparkling. Like everything’s about to kill me.</p><p>And in the center of all this ice are the Empress and her dead fiancé, the two of them in plain sight with their shadows huge against the wall.</p><p>At least that’s all I get to see before I shelter myself behind the giant rock. Then everything’s back to pitch-black dark, except for the light aura.</p><p>By now, all the spirits are quiet. Except for one.</p><p>Me, surrounded by the killer snow, my arms are shaking. And the low voice of the Empress says, “You seriously picked this place for us to dance?” She says, “Really?”</p><p>In my head, I’m praying, thank you, thank you. In my head, I’m praying, please, please.</p><p>In my head, I’m praying, please go away, Angelo.</p><p>And Angelo says, “Okay, well, you’ve always brought me to weird places yourself.” He says, “I’m just doing the same, right?”</p><p>Me, hiding behind a giant rock, lowering my axe to my lap, I hear some shuffling coming from the center area.</p><p>Angel-Face raises his voice and says, “Please close your eyes before you turn back around!”</p><p>The Empress grunts. “Why do I have to keep my eyes closed?” she asks.</p><p>And Angelo says, “Do it for me, please.” He says, “I don’t want you to look at me. We can dance, just don’t look at me.”</p><p>The light aura flickers slightly.</p><p>He says, “Come on, Al. That’s all I ask.”</p><p>At my feet, there are smaller, fist-sized rocks and chunks. All of them are about the same size as the one that crushed Angelo’s face.</p><p>I bite down hard on the frost-stopper bone and all my tongue can taste is bitterness.</p><p>“Fine,” the Empress says. Her cloak swooshes and her boots tap, then the next second she lets out a small yelp and skids over the ice. “Shit!” she yells. “I can’t see where I’m going like this, Angelo.”</p><p>Angel-Face shushes her. “Keep your eyes closed,” he says. “I’ll help you. Don’t worry.”</p><p>I move my axe to the side and turn around, glancing up from behind the rock at the giant shadows on the wall. I keep my hands away from the snow because while the air’s warm, the snow’s not.</p><p>I know I’m breathing the loudest but for some reason I can’t hear it.</p><p>I know I’m not supposed to be here but I have to make sure she comes out of here alive. That’s my self-proclaimed, stupid job, but right now it doesn’t sound as stupid as it should.</p><p>Angel-Face says, “Open up your arms.”</p><p>So she does.</p><p>Then Angelo’s shadow gets up real close to the Empress’s, and he puts his hand on her lower back. “Put your left arm up near my shoulder,” he tells her.</p><p>So she does.</p><p>For a second, I glance a little farther out and see a golden light glint from the Empress’s ring, the one that isn’t supposed to be hers.</p><p>The two shadows merge together into one big blob now, and Angel-Face asks, “Can you make your dragon arm a little more, uh, holdable?”</p><p>And the giant ugly thing shrinks down to something a little less monstrous.</p><p>“That’s kinda better,” he says. “It’s not gonna bite me, is it?”</p><p>The Empress’s shadow shrugs and she says, “Dunno.”</p><p>Angelo’s shadow twitches a bit. “Ah…” he says, slowly moving his arm down to grasp the Empress’s hand. Then he extends their arms away from themselves. “Well,” he says, “I’m just hoping for the best.”</p><p>The Empress lowers her voice. “You’re already dead anyway,” she says.</p><p>He replies, “I know.”</p><p>And me, I’m thinking, they’re making this a happy moment so she doesn’t cry.</p><p>Angelo says, “I’m gonna start stepping to my left. You go the opposite way.”</p><p>So the Empress’s shadow nods and light tapping starts echoing throughout the cave. At first, it’s just that. Tapping. One, two, three, four. Tapping. They’re dancing. The tapping on the ice bounces off the pillars, off the stalactites, off the rocks and back to the center, and they’re dancing in plain silence.</p><p>“This,” he says, “was the dance we were supposed to do at our wedding.”</p><p>She whispers, “I know.”</p><p>And me, I’m wondering if there’s more that she knows.</p><p>Then all of a sudden, a soft, chilling tune resonates throughout the cave. It’s a voice that pierces the soul and beyond. It’s a voice singing in the ancient language only a Dragonblood could understand—simple phrases of worship and praise and blessing towards the Astral Dragon.</p><p>I scratch my freezing ears a bit and it’s Amica’s voice. Our Oracle’s voice. The ringworm that won’t leave me alone.</p><p>The tapping starts going one, two, three-four-five and sudden stop. “Uh, don’t be scared,” Angelo says. “I-It’s just my magic.”</p><p>“Bullshit.”</p><p>“It’s not, I swear.”</p><p>The light aura flickers slightly.</p><p>The Empress growls, “I hate your surprises sometimes.”</p><p>“I hate them too,” Angelo says, “but I can’t help it.” He says, “I was never that good at controlling them…”</p><p>One, two, three, four.</p><p>“She’s dead, isn’t she?”</p><p>“I-I don’t know.”</p><p>Our Oracle.</p><p>The Oracle’s voice rings out and the Empress says, “You were the one who made her talk at Asura Gate.”</p><p>“I wasn’t.”</p><p>Five, six, seven, eight.</p><p>“You made her talk because you’re angry with me,” she says, “about the—about killing.”</p><p>“I didn’t,” he replies. “Swear on my heart.”</p><p>It’s funny because we both know she’s killed a lot of monsters as a kid too. There shouldn’t be a surprise here.</p><p>Angel-Face heaves a sigh and says, “Al, I can’t hate you for anything.” He says, “Let’s enjoy this.”</p><p>The shadows spin around and go one, two, three, four. The voice rings out.</p><p>“No, you don’t get it,” the Empress says.</p><p>Me, I don’t get it either.</p><p>Then Angelo’s shadow shakes his head. “We only have a bit of time here,” he says. “I don’t know how long this barrier’s gonna hold up. Let’s just make it count.”</p><p>The light aura flickers slightly and one of the oil lamps further back in the cave reignites.</p><p>“I know you can’t see anything,” Angelo says, “but right now it really is dark except for here.” To the Empress, he explains that the lamps nearby keep extinguishing because the rose’s absorbing them for power.</p><p>One, two, three, four.</p><p>“Did the rose let you possess me too?” she asks.</p><p>Angelo says he doesn’t actually know. What I do know now, though, is that the Witch was right this whole time.</p><p>Five, six, seven, eight.</p><p>The spice from the frost-stopper bone hits my throat and I start coughing. No sound comes out.</p><p>The Empress says, “But you heard what Milo said.”</p><p>“Uh-huh.” The shadows turn. Angel-Face says, “I did.”</p><p>They heard what I said.</p><p>Their shadows swaying up and down, Angelo says, “I wish he told us sooner.” He says, “To be honest, I feel like I took something away from him, y’know…”</p><p>I mouth that it’s not his fault.</p><p>“I looked up to him a lot,” he tells her. “I was just scared to be friends with him since I thought I wasn’t, well, good enough.”</p><p>One, two, three, four.</p><p>“I can’t forget when I broke his axe,” he says. “You remember? I did buy him a new one but he never took it.”</p><p>Five, six, seven, eight.</p><p>“You seriously think he cares about that?” the Empress chuckles.</p><p>“I mean,” he says, “maybe not. B-But that’s the thing.”</p><p>The shadows turn.</p><p>Angelo says, “He lost something greater, and there’s nothing I can do that can pay him back.”</p><p>That saint, that angel-face, Angelo, he literally has nothing to hide. At all.</p><p>I have everything to hide.</p><p>But he’s reading my fucking mind and he doesn’t even know I’m here.</p><p>“It’s embarrassing, yeah,” he says, “but he kinda became my idol that day. He gave me the best idea ever and I… I took it for granted. Those kids loved him and I just… sorta took the attention away from him.”</p><p>Grinding my teeth on the bone, I’m praying for him not to say it.</p><p>He says, “Honestly, I should’ve realized he was lonely. Ever since we met he was always alone unless he was with us.”</p><p>One, two, three, four.</p><p>“I’d see him by himself on the outskirts of the village,” he says. “S-Some days I just didn’t see him at all. He just worked and worked, all the time. I knew he tried acting like nothing was wrong but he didn’t look too happy himself either.”</p><p>Five, six, seven, eight.</p><p>He says, “I’ve always wondered… why people didn’t like him.”</p><p>I’m thinking, me too.</p><p>“When I found out he didn’t have parents,” he says, “I kinda had an idea but it didn’t make sense to me. Like, uh, in other villages my family and I visited, there were these old, packed orphanages, a-and I found out a lot of kids died literally because they couldn’t get enough love… or something like that.”</p><p>The Empress is quiet.</p><p>“Then my dad told me about this rumor that went around. Apparently his parents used to be the Warriors of the old Oracle but they weren’t able to protect her and she was killed, s-so they were shunned from the village.”</p><p>I mouth that it’s not my fault.</p><p>“I can’t believe that people would hate Milly for something like that,” he mutters. “It’s why I feel so… unfairly lucky. It’s also why my dad couldn’t hate him. But even after all our time together, I-I still feel really bad.”</p><p>I mouth that it’s not his fault.</p><p>“I remember when you said he was your best friend.”</p><p>I’m praying that he doesn’t say it.</p><p>After a moment of silence, Angel-Face says, “So it also feels like I just… took you away from him, too.”</p><p>And there.</p><p>He’s said it.</p><p>He just spat everything out just like that.</p><p>He took everything I've been thinking all these years—everything, from the Empress's tenth birthday to this moment here, right now—he took everything I've been denying all these years and just let it all out.</p><p>The shadows turn.</p><p>Angelo says, “He did say he loved you.”</p><p>I’m mouthing, it’s not your fault. I’m mouthing, it’s not your fault and I don’t think that way anymore. It’s not your fault. I’m the one who did something to you. I’m the one who hurt her and I’m the one who hurt myself. It’s not your fault.</p><p>He just said everything and I'm still fucking denying it.</p><p>He says, “Do you see what I mean?”</p><p>And the Empress, what the hell, she just casually, casually tells him that it’s not his fault, too.</p><p>This possession shit is really tearing me apart.</p><p>For these few moments alone, I believe her. And then, I don’t.</p><p>The Empress says, “Don’t worry about it,” while I’m thinking, I’m trying not to. “Angelo,” she says, “come on. I don’t want you sad right now. You said let’s make this count, so let’s.”</p><p>The light aura flickers and I’m thinking, neither of them should be sad right now even if it hurts me. I’m thinking, she’s making this a happy moment so he doesn’t cry. But I’m probably wrong.</p><p>One, two, three, four. The voice, the music, it grows weaker.</p><p>She tells him to remember something happy and he says, ”Well.” He says, awkwardly, “I do remember when we had sex for the first time.”</p><p>Fishing for kippers.</p><p>Even right now I still wish Lou wasn’t the only girl he could say that to. No, he even told me once. Just the two of them and no one else. The fact it’s true makes the whole thing more sacred than it ought to be.</p><p>I hate how sacred this moment is.</p><p>And after what he just said about me, I hate it even more.</p><p>Five, six, seven, eight. The voice, the music, it’s vanished. And for some reason, the Empress gulps down really, really loud. “I kinda wish you wouldn’t say that,” she says.</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“It makes me sad now.”</p><p>She says it so casually.</p><p>“What’s so sad about it?”</p><p>The shadows turn.</p><p>She says, “We didn’t realize all our plans would get destroyed like that.”</p><p>“I mean,” he says, “sure, we won’t be able to live together. But at least one of our plans worked out in the end, right?”</p><p>The Empress says nothing.</p><p>There shouldn’t be a surprise here. But sitting in the killer snow, I’m thinking, I don’t know what they’re talking about anymore.</p><p>“If the baby turned out to be a boy, we’d call him Zachariah,” Angelo says. “If a girl, then Zola.”</p><p>The shadows turn.</p><p>The Empress says nothing.</p><p>“Is there something wrong?”</p><p>The Empress says nothing. I mouth nothing.</p><p>“Al,” he says, “where’s our kid?”</p><p>And the Empress, she doesn’t say anything.</p><p>“Alouette,” he says again, softer, “where is our kid?”</p><p>One, two, three-four-five-six-stop-stop-stop.</p><p>At first, for a long time, the only answer is silence. Then the Empress whispers, “You never knew.” She whispers, “I thought you’d know by now.”</p><p>She has a secret. She had a secret. This is her secret.</p><p>“The baby was never born,” she says, “because I had to kill them.”</p><p>Stop-stop-stop-stop. The shadows stop. Everything stops.</p><p>The light aura flickers, and in the distance, ten oil lamps reignite all at once. The air feels colder, biting at my skin. The shadows on the wall, they move apart.</p><p>“Angelo,” the Empress says, “I’m gonna look at your face.”</p><p>Angelo says, “Don’t.”</p><p>I remember her spasming on the day of the winter festival, her biting down on her lip and rocking back and forth with her arms around her stomach. Around her abdominal area.</p><p>She says, “I know I can never make up for what I did.” She yells, “I know I can’t, and I’m sorry! But please, let me do this for you…”</p><p>I remember the fishhook, the blood, painted in a huge circle of red, seeping through the planks with the fishing rod and the hook completely smeared the same color.</p><p>The Empress’s shadow looks up. Her dead fiancé’s shadow looks down. In the distance, only two lamps are left unlit, and the light aura starts to dim. The arms of the Empress’s shadow reach up and caress his face.</p><p>After a moment, the Empress growls, “I’ll kill whoever killed you to make up for it.” She growls, “Tell me who did this to you.”</p><p>“B-But you already know that the Knights k-killed me,” he replies.</p><p>The second to last lamp reignites.</p><p>The Empress repeats, “Tell me who destroyed your face.”</p><p>The air starts freezing and eating at my raw, frozen skin. My nose. My cheeks. My ears.</p><p>“T-The one who destroyed my face,” Angelo stammers, “is someone I’ve already f-forgiven.”</p><p>The last lamp reignites, and the light aura explodes to pitch-black dark.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0013"><h2>13. Chapter 13</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the beginning, after the explosion, only my hands are moving around. The index finger of my right hand pokes the index finger of my left, but it feels like pushing against air. Moving my numb fingers about, I feel my index and middle fingers slide against the metal handle of my axe.</p><p>My back, it’s pressing against some cold and wet sensation that starts at my spine. The coolness slowly seeps to my shoulders, my collarbone, my neck. Something cold and harsh bursts into my nostrils, through my mouth and down my esophagus. Then something hot and dry comes back out. The spice from the bone stings around the back of my throat.</p><p>While it’s blooming up my metal boots, up my ankles and up my legs, the chilling continues rising up my neck, to the bottom of my head, to my chin and up to my ears. Slowly, my left arm cracks free, and my right arm afterward. My arms shivering, I push up against the freezing air till my hands are level with my eyes. Then I stretch open my hands wide and cup them over my ears, press against the sides of my head so hard they’re trembling. And then they start feeling warm.</p><p>In the beginning, everything’s quiet. And then I start screaming.</p><p>A giant, hot fog escapes my mouth and obscures my vision, blurring the bright lights of the oil lamps so far away. I kick away the snow eating at my feet, crunching through until there’s a clear rectangle of plain rock and ice where I was just sitting. Stabbing the bottom end of my axe into the ground, I put my two hands on the shaft and shudder my way up to my feet, first my left leg, then my right. Around me, there are two halves: there are the bright, spotted lights of the cave I fought my way through, and then there’s the black, clear area where the Empress and her dead fiancé were just dancing. The light aura’s gone. Angelo’s gone.</p><p>I know I was never supposed to be here but I have to make sure Lou comes out of here alive.</p><p>The rocks—the masses leaning over the dark center area like folks looking down a deep grave—I take my numb hands and pull these rocks hard until they crack off and I throw them off to the side. The light from the oil lamps is bright enough that it shines through.</p><p>Then I find her.</p><p>I find her on the floor, her skin blue and cold, still and silent. Icy shards spread throughout her body, sticking out like needles.</p><p>In my head, I’m praying, please, please. We made a promise, please, please.</p><p>I grab her by the shoulders and shake her as hard as I can. Her skin cold against my fingertips, I’m yelling, “Alouette!” I’m yelling, “Alouette, dammit, wake up!”</p><p>The hardest thing to look at on a dead body is the face.</p><p>I’m praying she isn’t a dead body, no. But her eyes, barely open, have lost all the color in them. </p><p>All that fire is gone. </p><p>Her soul got sucked right out of her.</p><p>I force her jaw open, fish a frost-stopper bone out of my bag and clamp her teeth down on it. But the shards of ice still stick to her skin. I’m yelling her name over and over again and shaking her shoulders with the cold biting at my cheeks and ears, and the Empress is still not waking up.</p><p>I’m yelling at her, “We made a promise!” The cold sweat trailing down my forehead, I’m yelling at her, “Don’t fucking die on me, Lou!”</p><p>The hardest thing to look at on a dead body is the face.</p><p>Behind me, the oil lamps start lighting up and snuffing out rapidly, as if they’re all getting possessed by spirits. The blood from my armor, from my dragon chest, it wipes onto her clothes and body and looks black.</p><p>I nearly choke on my frost-stopper bone as I’m gasping for air. Everything hits my throat hard and rough as I take two fingers to her neck to check her pulse. I couldn’t save my father. I couldn’t save the captain. I’m thinking, please, let me save her. But her neck’s so cold that even my numb fingers feel a tinge warmer in comparison.</p><p>The oil lamps behind me fire up and extinguish as the spirits start howling into my ears, screaming at me, engulfing me. Their shrieks, the wind, they travel from the entrance of the cave all the way to where we are, and they start circling around us.</p><p>On my left ear, screaming. On my right ear, screaming.</p><p>A rumbling sensation surges around the rock and the ice. From the corner of my eye, I see a madhouse of flickering lights jeering at me. Closer and closer come the spirits, pressing against my head, pressing against my ears, and they scream, “How dare you rob!” They scream, “How dare!”</p><p>And then the flames smother all at once.</p><p>Where we’re at, it’s complete, utter darkness.</p><p>I’m blinking but it doesn’t matter if my eyes are open or closed—everything’s pitch-black dark. I’m screaming as the spice from the bone weakens and the ice starts trailing up my legs. Even at this moment, I hate the idea I’d leave her behind if I could find my way back.</p><p>Because as much as you hate yourself, you still want to save yourself in the end.</p><p>My hands are squeezing something cold and fleshy. The Empress’s arms, probably. There’s something hot in front of me. My breathing. Blood, maybe. Maybe something stabbed me through the chest, but I can’t feel it.</p><p>There’s a thorn through my heart, though. My rotten heart. That’s the only thing I know for sure. That, and I’ve run out of frost-stopper bones in my bag. Soon, the spirits will come back, the rumbling will come back, and the Empress and I are gonna end up crushed under all the rubble. Dead.</p><p>What we’ll be is dead. Dead, frozen, and unforgiven.</p><p>I stop screaming because I can’t even hear myself anymore.</p><p>It’s just the two of us here. Here in the dark. This is it.</p><p>Tomorrow, the Witch and the Shinobi are gonna wake up and never find us. Not right away, at least. Then they’ll get a search team who hates us to go look for us. The Witch is gonna puke in the snow at the sight of our dead bodies and all the blood. Then the Shinobi’s gonna turn her away, and they’ll leave us here because they can’t do anything about us anymore. Or the Celestial worshippers are gonna burn us and offer us up to Primatis. Failures. Pathetic deaths simply through frostbite.</p><p>And even after all that, I’d still hate myself.</p><p>I squeeze my eyes shut. At least I think they’re closed. Straining my eyelids so tightly that they tug at the skin of my cheeks and my forehead, what I’m doing is I’m trying to cry. And I can’t.</p><p>It’s so hard.</p><p>I can’t cry over myself.</p><p>My eyebrows tense up. My arms, my hands, my legs, they all tense up. My chest rises and falls so heavily as the hot air of someone about to die blasts through my nostrils.</p><p>In my head, I’m praying, please, please. Even if I die, please, let her fucking survive. Kill me but don’t hurt her anymore. I’m praying, if I have to break my promise then fine by me.</p><p>Punish me so she doesn’t get hurt.</p><p>Let me be a scapegoat just one last time. For her.</p><p>I’m praying, please, please.</p><p>And then I start screaming again.</p><p>Fucking shit.</p><p>What makes me scream is a sudden blast of light to my right. At first, it’s a little dim, shining a crystal-like pattern onto the ice wall. It’s tiny, but with the oil lamps snuffed out, it’s all the light we’ll get. It looks brighter than it really is.</p><p>What you’d think it is, is either salvation or death.</p><p>I want both. What I don’t want is Angelo.</p><p>When the light gets brighter, though, I see it’s encapsulated in a thick block of ice. It’s a light aura. It flickers, and then it slowly rises upward, rises like the frost blooming up my thighs now, onto the ice wall.</p><p>Where it’s coming from, it’s the unwilting white rose. Trapped and desperate in the ice.</p><p>I see this and I say, “You’re still here, huh?” Wherever he is, I tell him, “You’re pulling my fucking leg, aren’t you?”</p><p>Whatever sympathy I had for Angelo just left.</p><p>“You think you can get away with that,” I say, “with making her get frozen up? Right here?”</p><p>Tell me to shut up. I won’t even though I should.</p><p>As much as he hates himself, he’d still want to save himself in the end. And I’m not letting him get away.</p><p>I crack my legs free from the frost, turn to the wall and prime my axe in front of me. Watching the light aura slowly rise higher, I’m telling him, “I didn’t want to see you at Asura Gate. I never wanted to see you.”</p><p>The light aura spreads higher, and it starts highlighting some jagged, triangular gashes bunching together.</p><p>“Don’t think you’re some guardian angel, my friend,” I tell him. I’m getting closer with the hot air blasting through my teeth, and I tell him, “What you said about me? You’re right. Everyone lied to me. No one really liked me, not for long. No one liked my parents but they couldn’t shame them, so they put every-fucking-thing on me instead. And what did you do?” I repeat, “What did you do?”</p><p>As the light spreads even higher, the wall shows the carvings forming into a rough bulb shape atop a stem. The picture the Empress carved a day before.</p><p>I say, “I trusted you, man.” The ice crunches under my feet and I say, “But you took my solace away from me. Away from us. And now you’re gonna take her away from me too, huh?” My face hot, I scream, “You’re already fucking dead!” I scream, “You’re already bloody-fucking-dead! That’s why we left you alone! To move the hell on!”</p><p>The light aura gets bright enough that the blade of my axe shines blindingly. Blindingly red from the blood with steam rising from it.</p><p>“See what I’m saying?” I tell him. “Stop and smell your dead, dead flowers?”</p><p>The ice wall, it’s so clear now. Some leaves jut out around the stem, around the bottom of the bulb. The bulb shape finishes off with a flat top, rough loops circling its center. And the light blasts itself so high up, the sharp edges of the engraving twinkle with death.</p><p>I start laughing because I can’t cry.</p><p>“Everything’s hard enough for us already,” I laugh. “Amica’s gone. She’s probably dead. But we’re still looking for her, not you!” With each laugh, my throat dries up more and more, dries up so much the bone’s spice chokes me now. Laughing, I say, “So why don’t you do us a favor? Make it easier for all the rest of us who’s still living, Angel-Face?”</p><p>This level of disrespect for the dead is not mentioned in any Warrior training session.</p><p>The blood from my axe drips onto my feet, starts leaving drops of red in the snow. In front of me, etched into the ice wall, is a giant rose.</p><p>It’s not like chopping up the real rose will do anything. This is a joke.</p><p>With my hands tight around my axe, my arms tensed and my face burning, I scream,<br/>
“Why don’t you just leave us alone!?”</p><p>And I bring down my axe on the wall.</p><p>“Leave us alone!”</p><p>Again.</p><p>“Leave us alone!”</p><p>Again.</p><p>The blade of my axe sinks in so far, the gash’s stained red when it comes out. And I scream, “Leave us alone!”</p><p>Again and again and again. Over and over and over.</p><p>I keep trying to kill something when all I’m really doing is chopping myself up. Making myself sink lower and lower when I’m already so far below.</p><p>Again.</p><p>Here is another thing to add to my list of mistakes.</p><p>Again.</p><p>While I’m destroying the wall, while ice shards blast off in every direction from each blow, something’s shuffling in the snow behind me.</p><p>And here’s the moment I’m about to die. Because right when I figure it out, right behind me, the Empress starts shrieking.</p><p>The Empress tackles and pins me to the ground, nearly pushing my head against a sharp spike of ice underneath. The giant dragon in my chest flattens out, weakened, and the Empress’s screaming, screaming at me to stop, screaming at me to get away and I can barely hear her because my ears are so frozen.</p><p>At the same time, she has a rock in her hand.</p><p>And for a split second, it’s exactly the rock that crushed Angelo’s face.</p><p>She takes this rock with her normal hand and raises it high above her head, and then she slams it into my face, right into the X, right into the bridge of my nose. It starts stinging and burning all around it from the impact, my nose crushed. My eyes, I can barely see the jagged rock through the haze welling up in my vision.</p><p>She says, “I saw what you did.”</p><p>Smash. My head starts ringing.</p><p>She says, “You took him away from me!”</p><p>Crunch. I feel warm tears drop onto my face.</p><p>She says, “You took away my chance to see him for the last time!”</p><p>Crack. The blood floods my nose and throat and spurts from my nostrils.</p><p>And me, my head in a fresh pool of blood, I’m thinking, this is just my very, very late punishment.</p><p>At this point, I can’t save myself. And I don’t want to.</p><p>No rose is gonna save me here.</p><p>Yet for some reason, my dumbass is someone he’s already forgiven.</p><p>Looking down at me, the Empress, her red eyes are set alight now, but her voice—screaming, “How dare you rob? HOW DARE YOU ROB!?” with the hollowness of the Astral Dragon Atruum and the weight of all the spirits attacking me—it was no longer hers.</p><p>That’s when I realize I have to tell her.</p><p>I have to tell her before I breathe my last.</p><p>Coughing, I tell her, “I’m sorry.” I tell her, “I’m sorry for what I did.”</p><p>She freezes the bloodstained rock in the air. The steam from the blood on the rock and my face rises and dissipates into the stalactites overhead.</p><p>“Angelo,” I say, “was already dead when I did it.”</p><p>The Empress stares at me for a long, silent moment, her eyes sizzling, before slowly putting the rock down next to my head. Then she asks, “Why?”</p><p>My chest starts to feel heavy. My breath shortens and more blood spurts out of my mouth.</p><p>Crying, she pleads, “Why did you do it?”</p><p>I say, “I was ashamed.” My throat floods with blood and I say, “I couldn’t look at him.”</p><p>In my mouth, the frost-stopper bone’s been split in half. All the spice suddenly floods into my throat, along with the blood and spit. I’m choking and there’s blood everywhere on my face.</p><p>This is not the way you’d want to make a love confession.</p><p>A scar on her face, a scar on her heart. A jagged, ugly realization. A diagonal line from the best of her liveliness and her ability to ever forgive me.</p><p>I repeat, “He was already dead.”</p><p>And she sighs, “Why did you do it…?”</p><p>Behind us, the light aura flickers.</p><p>Weaker, me, sinking, I repeat, “He was already dead. He was already dead. He was already dead. He was already dead. He was already dead. He was already dead. He was already dead. He was already dead…”</p><p>The light aura dims, and, gradually, one-by-one, the oil lamps leading back to the mouth of the cave start lighting back up. And then the light aura’s gone.</p><p>With the blood blinding me, choking me, spreading down to my hair and my ears and my neck, I wonder, do I still have a face.</p><p>I wonder, do I still have a heart.</p><p>I wonder, will Alouette be okay.</p><p>Then for one last time, right when her eyes stop burning, when her voice becomes hers again, and she looks down at me then down at her hands and she gasps and screams at my gory face, I tell her, “I’m so, so, so fucking sorry.”</p><p>Now, here it is.</p><p>Here is the truth.</p><p>I’m dead.</p><p>I’m dying.</p><p>I have nothing to hide anymore.</p><p>I’m dead.</p><p>I’m dead.</p><p>I’m dead.</p>
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<a name="section0014"><h2>14. Chapter 14</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>One summer morning, a little boy of just five years old ran into the orphanage parlor carrying a long stick, a big iron nail, and a banana. With the scales on his chest glowing bright blue and his forehead glossed with sweat, this boy stood on his tippy toes so his head barely reached higher than the wooden desk in front of him. To the tall glasses-wearing woman behind the desk, he called, “Ma’am!” He called, “Ma’am, d’ya mind if I make an axe here?”</p><p>The woman brushed away a strand of off-white, fish-silver hair as she looked down at the boy, who shook the stick and nail with one hand and the banana with the other. “Oh, my, little Milly,” she chortled, “you have quite a deal of skill with your hands, but this may be your strangest project yet!”</p><p>The pipsqueak crouched down, positioned the banana curved downward onto the side of the stick, and then the nail on top. With both of his chubby thumbs on the head of the nail, the boy pushed with all his might. “I need an axe!” he squawked as the nail pierced through the banana.</p><p>“What could a boy like you need an axe for?” the orphanage director asked, jokingly.</p><p>The boy pushed his thumbs down harder, causing the point of impact to mush up as it dug into the wooden stick. And he said, “Because I need it!” He said, “Because I wanna be a Warrior like Mother and Father!”</p><p>The boy raised his new makeshift weapon into the air. It was about the same height as him. He needed only one hand to hold it up, but he let it weigh down both of his arms, and he gripped it tightly. The yellow-and-grey mush dripped from the nail.</p><p>He couldn’t see the director’s face, so the silence didn’t register to him.</p><p>So when he completed his weapon, he dashed out the door of the parlor and towards the nearest Demonpillar-sized rock he could find. His sandals kicked up dirt and sand behind him.</p><p>He stopped in front of the rock and planted his feet, tensed up whatever muscles he had and primed his banana-axe in front of him. He furrowed his brow and flared his nostrils, stared down the make-believe monster. Once his face grew hot enough, the boy, he declared, “By the decree of the Astral Dragon,” he declared, “you shall die!” And then he hit it.</p><p>At the point of impact, the banana exploded into a thick grey mess, splattered onto the rock. The stick bounced back in the boy’s hands, and the little pipsqueak landed on his bare back, onto the coarse sand. Regardless, the boy shook his head, whipped himself back up, raised the now-bent stick in his hand, and exclaimed, “I am the hero!” Standing proud, the boy, he exclaimed, “I am the Warrior!”</p><p>How times have changed.</p>
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<a name="section0015"><h2>15. Chapter 15</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I am a Hastan boy.</p><p>That is what they told me.</p><p>I am a Hastan boy raised by Hastan parents on the Southwestern Island Republic of Hasta.</p><p>For twelve years, that is what they told me. And I believed all of it, up until the real Hastan boy showed up. And me, looking at him, at Angelo—tiny, scrawny Angelo—I realized that no matter how fishy I smelled, no matter how big I grew, I was never, ever, a Hastan boy.</p><p>And even before he ever told me, I knew Angel-Face was a Hastan boy because there’s no way he could’ve lived at least three years per in Hasta, Medius, and Marlayus and all without going on so many damn boat trips.</p><p>You’d know someone’s Hastan once someone tells you you’re not.</p><p>Before Angelo showed up, as a boy, on some nights, I’d imagine being in a warm wooden bed on a soft mattress. Me, sound asleep, wrapped tightly in a cozy patchwork blanket, I’d feel the rough hand of my Hastan mother shaking my shoulder and whispering to me, “Wake up, little Milly, wake up. It’s a beautiful day.” My chubby, lazy,  small self, I’d yawn and stretch out my arms, then turn over and go right back to sleep. Then my Hastan mother would say again, “Milly, it’s a good morning,” while the waves outside crash softly and the birds outside chirp softly and the wind outside blows softly against the great green branches of the palm trees by our abode.</p><p>Slowly, slowly, younger me, I’d open my eyes and see the brilliant, short white hair, tied into a bun, and the suntanned skin of my Hastan mother. Maybe she’d have a scar or two on her face, or maybe some Warrior paint here and there, because I imagined her being a great fighter. Behind her, right by the doorway, standing below the hanging plants growing in hollowed-out coconut pots, would be my Hastan father with a fishing rod resting on his shoulder. He’d have great big muscles—both of my parents would—maybe some clean-looking white beard, and blue Warrior paint covering his chest and body. And maybe my Hastan father would call me “shrimp” or “bucko” or “mate” or “lad,” but always—and this’d be my favorite part—he’d come forward to tussle my hair, and my mother would be raising a thumbs-up and smiling. Then the two of them, together, would look at me and tell me: “Good morning, Milly!”</p><p>And then I’d wake up so early before the break of dawn, somewhere on a bunk bed amongst thirty other snoring orphans who are all younger than me, in order to help the director prepare everything for the day.</p><p>At first, it was just me and the director in the orphanage—the new one—since the old one needed big renovations. Most of the orphans became orphans because their parents were killed by monsters out in the wild. Some were arrested by Divine Knights. Some were taken into the circus.</p><p>The kids from Hasta thought their parents died from the poison rivers of Cadena Forest.</p><p>The kids from Pagnas thought their parents died from the monsters in the mineshafts.</p><p>The kids from Marlayus thought their parents were still alive, just that they were part of the rebellion there.</p><p>The kids from Litus thought their parents were magicians, and that they teleported themselves away with their magic glyphs when the kingdom fell.</p><p>The kids from Medius thought their parents were in the dungeons, and that one day, they’d come out.</p><p>Some kids—like me—didn’t know where they were from, but at least they knew <i>who</i> they came from. Kind of.</p><p>The few kids with Warrior parents, because most Warriors died before they ever got to fish for kippers, they believed theirs died on duty.</p><p>I wanted to believe mine died in a great big battle.</p><p>Sure, they were probably killed by monsters too. But since they had gravestones that read, “The Warriors of the Clan,” right next to Atruum’s sacred Den, I thought it couldn’t have been that simple.</p><p>Back then, before I had to do my Warrior rites, I used to ask the orphanage director about my parents. Then she’d respond by telling me about the Warriors, about the blessed Warrior paint the elders put all over your body. About how strong you had to be. About the months-long trial you had to do for your Warrior rites. That was all I understood about my parents. They were great, big, strong, and probably Hastan.</p><p>I’d ask her, “What were their names?” since that part was so faded out on their gravestones.</p><p>And she’d say, “You’ll find out one day,” or, “I can’t remember right now, little Milly.”</p><p>I’d ask her, “I’m from Hasta, right? With the fish and the fishers and the sand and the ocean?”</p><p>And she, minding the bottled merchant ship in her hands, she’d say, “Yes, Milly, that makes sense.”</p><p>The orphanage director, stationed by the front desk, she’d tell me my parents used to protect the Oracle. Every one hundred years, the Oracle would be reincarnated by the Astral Dragon Atruum. His or her special power was communicating with Atruum in order to help the Dragonblood Clan thrive. It was the reason why our village was so alive, alive with so many plants and water sources and people around. Because Atruum and the Oracle protected it so well.</p><p>“And the Warriors too,” younger me would add.</p><p>“Yes, Milly,” the director would say, “the Warriors too.”</p><p>The other orphans, they didn’t bother us whenever we talked. Instead, they talked to each other, played with each other, sometimes rough and sometimes not. I was too big and fat to catch up to any of them, and I was afraid to accidentally crush them or hit them. They never went to me unless they needed to reach something on a me-sized shelf, since I grew up faster than the others. Looking at them playing while I was out fishing, well, at least they were happy.</p><p>I was eight and the Empress was six when we first met. Actually, not met, but saw for the first time. The first time I saw her, I was out early and fishing by the river when I saw her drawing in the dirt with a stick. And that girl, barefoot in loose clothing, she was drawing crude Warriors in the ground. The Warriors, those were her first dirt-drawings. And then the Ogres. And then the swords and the Goblins, entire wars with the Dragonblood Warriors as the victors. With her stick in hand, she waved it around and threw blow by blow against invisible monsters, against the wind pushing against her. But really, the wind never pushed against her. She flowed with the breeze, and the breeze flowed with her attacks. When she finished, when the Chief called her to come home, she looked up at me from across the riverbank, her short white hair covering her eyes, and waved at me. With the stick.</p><p>The Empress and I, what we shared was our imagination. What we shared was the “O” in our nicknames, Lou and Milo, which we started using because she wanted to run out with me at night, go exploring caves and forests and climbing the waterfalls, with me pretending to be a Warrior and her just being herself. Lou and Milo, those were our codenames. Those were special. That’s why you’re not allowed to call her “Lou,” and you’re not allowed to call me “Milo.”</p><p>I loved her because she loved me. Because I couldn’t love someone I didn’t really know.</p><p>It was a mutual, blended world in our heads, where the truth didn’t matter because we made the truth.</p><p>That stupid title—the Warrior of the Empress—that was just a childhood fantasy turned to adulthood.</p><p>It was this childhood fantasy that brought me to the barrel in the middle of the orphanage parlor. Because there were thirty, forty, fifty of us kids now, and the director needed help getting everyone to settle down for bed.</p><p>Big, tall, younger me, I was surrounded by rowdy little white-haired, fanged, scaled, tailed, sharp-eyed kids on cushions on the woven floor mat, all of them jumpy and waiting to get their energies out. Behind them, the orphanage director rocked back and forth on the rocking chair, reading a book and writing on it with a quill and ink. We had only two light sources: a single oil lantern hung above me and a small candle by the director. Everywhere else was darkened blue.</p><p>How it worked was I was supposed to repeat a story rehearsed by the director. She taught me how to read that way, reading forwards and backwards, yeah, enunciating each and every word at perfect speed and perfect emotion. She tipped her glasses at me and smiled as I sat there with my feet floating off the ground.</p><p>How it ended up was I hopped off the barrel, grabbed the closest stick from out the front door, hopped back onto the barrel, and raised the stick into the air, shouting, “Hike!” Booming, “Hike! Listen to the voice of Atruum!” My vocal chords tensing up, me, almost screeching now, I squealed, “Listen to the voice of Atruum, for the Warriors are COMING BACK!”</p><p>And I raised the stick so high up, the lantern set it on fire.</p><p>All the kids held their breaths, and me, they couldn’t see me from how dark it was, but I was smiling so big.</p><p>Younger me with the flaming stick, I waved it around and all the kids gasped and their eyes chased the burning dragon slithering in the air. Small orange, yellow, and red embers chipped off it as it swayed.</p><p>Smiling, I shouted, “Atruum!” I shouted, “Atruum is here! He is going to give us a blessing!” I kept swaying until the ashes dropped onto my fingers, then I brought the stick down and blew the fire out. “The spirit of Atruum is with us all!” I announced.</p><p>The kids cheered, and once they screamed at their loudest, I put a finger to my mouth and blasted a great hush over all of them until they fell silent. “The elders are coming,” I whispered to them.</p><p>They listened and heard the chirping of cicadas.</p><p>After a moment, I took the burnt stick and broke it in two, then smacked them against the sides of the barrel to mimic marching. “Stomp with me!” I commanded. “Help the elders come in! Stomp with me!”</p><p>And they followed.</p><p>“Stomp, stomp, stomp!” I cried.</p><p>“Stomp, stomp, stomp!” they cried back. The kids, they slapped the ground with their hands and feet. The woven mats below us shook.</p><p>In the back echoed the scratching of a quill on paper.</p><p>“What’s about to happen,” I said, “is that the Warriors are going to be blessed! You will get to see them! You will get to see it happen!”</p><p>The kids swayed their heads around, then looked up at me, confused. So I whispered, “You will see them if you look close enough.”</p><p>They looked. They listened.</p><p>“Every one hundred years,” I told them, “at least one new Warrior of the Astral Dragon is born.” I took a breath, closed my eyes, and told them, “And sometimes a whole new group of them comes around! And you know why they’re so special?”</p><p>No one replied.</p><p>“It’s because it’s not just the elders blessing them!” I exclaimed. I pointed at the lantern above me, then trailed my finger down. “Atruum himself comes down from the moon and up from the depths to give them his blessing,” I said.</p><p>This was before I opened a history book on my own, by the way.</p><p>I wasn’t stupid, but I didn’t give a shit.</p><p>In the back, the director stopped writing and stared at me. Her glasses glinted orange against her candle.</p><p>Back on the barrel, all eyes on me for sure now, I asked them, “And you know why else they’re special?”</p><p>The kids shook their heads. The director smiled behind her book.</p><p>Then I said, “It’s because every generation, those Warriors get stronger and stronger and stronger!” I breathed, “And stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger and—oh! The elders are moving again! Stomp with me!”</p><p>Every time I told them to stomp, every time I told them to listen, they followed me.</p><p>This ritual, this storytelling thing, the director let me do it every few afternoons and nights since then. And not just to the orphans. Kids with actual families came over because their friends heard about me. About the great, big, future Warrior, Milan.</p><p>One time I told them my parents weren’t just Warriors, but Warriors of the Astral Dragon. The fantastical type I made up. The orphans who had Warrior parents started claiming the same thing. Their parents were big, strong, blessed by Atruum, and reincarnations. They argued a lot with the kids with Warrior parents still alive.</p><p>Some of the kids told me they had a feeling that their parents were reincarnated, or that they themselves were reincarnated. That they were destined to be Warriors. Those kids, they became part of my group, the blue one, the fishhook one, after our induction.</p><p>Combined with my stories of the Empress, about her fighting affinity, what the hell, the kids began asking me if she was a reincarnated Warrior too.</p><p>Each time, the world in my head grew with mismatched facts and mismatched anecdotes, mismatched lessons and mismatched identities.</p><p>Sitting with my arms crossed on the barrel, me, with a dumb smirk on my face, I blindly said, “Yes!” I blindly said, “She might be the greatest Warrior ever!”</p><p>It’s less lying and more thriving in my imagination. It’s the one thing that wasn’t taken away from me when I was just a month old. Living mattered. The truth didn’t.</p><p>But the truth started to matter on the day of the Empress’s tenth birthday, on the day I came back, on the day Angelo first arrived.</p><p>It was just a rumor at first. The elders spread it around. A rumor that Milan ran away. A rumor that Milan died. A rumor that, oh, that Dougenis boy ran away like that lazy coward Andrew.</p><p>Or, oh, that Dougenis boy plans to elope with the Empress.</p><p>That Dougenis boy is a big damn liar!</p><p>I just fulfilled half of my dream and there’s barely any space for all these rumors in my mismatched world. “The great big Warrior of the Astral Dragon, Milan, who lied, ran away, eloped with the Empress, and died” has a shitty ring to it. Oh, and his father was a lazy coward who also died.</p><p>The blessed blue war paint on my body meant dedication, defense, steadfastness. But whenever the other blue-group inductees saw my paint, they covered theirs with a shirt or a robe or whatever. The year after, the next inductees got red, yellow, purple, or green. No one got blue. Blue meant you’d have to work under the great big liar lazy coward fatty eloping perverted dead Warrior Dougenis boy, Milan. Under the guy who escaped getting kicked out because he trespassed into the Den.</p><p>The only reason I was leader was due to seniority.</p><p>The kids’ rumor about me was they hoped I was really a ghost so they had a chance to take over. They hoped that I touched Atruum’s heart, and that Atruum took my soul far, far away. My rotten heart.</p><p>Living mattered, but I guess the truth mattered more.</p><p>And three years after my induction, cue Angelo’s turn on the barrel.</p><p>A real Hastan. The son of a former Chief. The son of an accomplished doctor. The Empress’s new best friend and my new best friend.</p><p>“The Secret Magician” is what they called him. The unwilting white rose and the words of his parents backed him up. His nights over lit up like a winter festival with magic snow, where each snowflake contained an inkling of pure truth.</p><p>He could’ve said, “The best herbs are all around the orphanage.” Instead, he said, “The best ones are in Cadena Forest, the ones in the purple caves lit up by blue bioluminescent mushrooms, but they’re filled with monsters!” A white wisp flew out of the rose as he mused, “I’d have gone there if I had even a fraction of Milan’s or the Empress’s power…”</p><p>Clumps of wisps flew out the rose, combining into fragile mushrooms stuck on the orphanage walls. Some of the kids reached up to touch them, and the particles danced around their little hands.</p><p>He could’ve said, “I’m a master of these spells, like the magicians centuries before me.” Instead, with his fingers, he led the miniature tornado towards the oil lamp and back down in a great arc, wrapping it in warmth, and he said, “My magic isn’t strong enough to protect against much, not yet at least.” Then he looked straight at me, me hiding in the back room and cleaning clothes, and said, “But at least I’m not exactly alone. And that’s beautiful.”</p><p>Then, at the highest point of the arc, the tornado released a soft snowfall, lighting up the smiles on Angelo’s face and the faces of all sixty or so orphans on the woven mat.</p><p>They were all genuine smiles.</p><p>The rumors changed from, oh, that Dougenis boy lied, to, oh, that Ros boy is so humble.</p><p>Or, oh, that Ros boy has a great life ahead of him.</p><p>That Ros boy is perfect for the Empress!</p><p>And this, I believed this. I still do.</p><p>He had parents and relatives still alive. He was from the land of my dreams. He was a scholar, a magician. His heart was truth. And I’ve never seen the Empress happier.</p><p>One time, after he finished presenting and all the kids fell asleep, we hung out together out the front of the orphanage. We sat cross-legged on the wooden porch, watched the villagers clean up all the decor from the last winter festival. The unwilting white rose lit up a small circle between us.</p><p>Angelo, looking up at the starlit sky, he said, “I wonder if the stars are just embers chipping off Astral Dragons?”</p><p>I scoffed and scratched my jaw. That was from one of my stories. So I told him, “That’s just bullshit and you know that, Angel-Face.”</p><p>“Maybe it’s bullshit to you,” he replied, “but sometimes bullshit is truth in a way.”</p><p>I raised an eyebrow at him and a shooting star flew by.</p><p>Angelo rubbed his chin. “I’ve never been to Litus. I don’t know jack about the stars,” he said. “The only thing we have is our imagination.” He trailed his finger around the rose and several glowing specks flew upward, settling around the porch. One batch landed on my finger and another floated around his head like a decimated halo. “I think the stars look like this because that’s all we get to see,” he said.</p><p>I put my finger in front of my eye, then raised the speck to replace the moon.</p><p>“I don’t think there’s anything bad with guessing,” he told me. “I think everyone sees the world wrong in a way.” He laughed. “Just because I’m a scholar doesn’t mean I’ll know everything. It’s okay to pretend.”</p><p>He said that so casually.</p><p>Angelo said, “Sometimes your dreams are just what you wanna be.” He crossed his arms behind his neck and leaned against the wall. Then, after a long, long moment, he said, “I wanted to be you.”</p><p>The glowing speck on my finger grew bigger, so I held it outward.</p><p>“I mean it,” he continued. “I wanted to be you.” He played with the wisps in the air. “I wanted your courage, I wanted your strength, I…” He lowered his voice. “I just wanted to be you,” he declared.</p><p>I said nothing.</p><p>Angelo sighed. “A-Anyway,” he stuttered, “I wanna do something before I go.” He leaned forward from the wall and said, “I wanna send out some dreams.” He pressed his fingers together and all the wisps around him combined into a mass like a fist-sized rock. Then he said, “We’re going to be sending our dreams into the cosmos.”</p><p>I examined the wisp on my fingertip. “I haven’t dreamed in a long time,” I finally said.</p><p>“Everyone has dreams, Milly,” he insisted.</p><p>Then I told him, “Not everyone sticks with them.” The wisp in my finger grew to the size of my palm, so I brought it down to my chest and cupped it. “Sometimes people let go of their dreams earlier than others,” I said, “that’s all.”</p><p>Then Angelo declared, “I think people just forget, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone.”</p><p>Despite the nighttime breeze, the wisp warmed my palms like a heart on fire.</p><p>“I’m sending Al’s dream to her, too,” he told me. He dragged a finger from the rose to the building on the highest landmass, and a wisp shot out in that direction. Once my vision adjusted, a girl in red and black stood by the edge with a glowing white dot above her hand. She waved at us and Angelo waved back.</p><p>Angelo spun his dream around his arm. “We’ll be throwing these at the moon,” he said.</p><p>Me, my dumbass, I squeezed the wisp in my hands, and it burst into a million particles. But none of them fell to the ground. Instead, they heated up my hands so much they turned cold.</p><p>“Let’s throw them at the same time,” he told me, “on three.” Then he raised his free hand into the air and went one, then two, then three.</p><p>And so the three of us, the Empress and Angelo and I, we sent our dreams into the cosmos.</p><p>Once our wisps collided right at the center of the moon, they formed a new, full moon, pure and true. And then, our moon exploded into a million specks, disappearing as they fell into the night.</p><p>Then Angelo smiled so big at the sky and said, “May all our dreams be fulfilled.”</p><p>For the world in my head, what Angelo did wasn’t a crime, but it wasn’t a blessing, either. It was just my very, very late punishment.</p><p>It was less Angelo and more the truth that ruined me.</p><p>I ruined Angelo because I could not ruin the truth.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0016"><h2>16. Chapter 16</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>When I was twelve and all the other boys and girls were out for the summer festival, the orphanage parlor empty and blue, I sat by the front desk and put my head down. My breaths formed mists on the table’s surface as I stared at the candle to my left, the flame dancing as if it were about to pull itself off the wick and land on my finger. The table, it squished up the fat of my face against my teeth and gums, but my teeth pushed back each time I grinded them together. You do this long enough and you start getting real aware of your big fat blue-painted stomach, feeling real tense since you’ve been slouched over for a while. You start to forget the real reason you came here.</p><p>This is after you tried going out that door, and the elders and the older Warriors in the procession glared at you with their sharp old eyes. Like their silhouettes, black against the red late afternoon sky, you were marked clear out of the group of orphans around you because of your size and the color of your torso. Because of the stupid scales on your chest and your stupid round face. Because all of the other kids ran ahead of you, and you were the last one because you were too shocked after tripping over a fist-sized rock.</p><p>You didn’t make it to the Empress. You didn’t even take that many steps past the front porch.</p><p>You used to like those scales and that face, but you never asked to be born with them. So you hid them. You kept to yourself, alone in the orphanage parlor in front of the desk of the only adult you really trusted. And you pleaded to yourself, “I am a Hastan boy, I am a Hastan boy…” You pleaded to yourself the truth you made up as if that would make it real.</p><p>You sat in the hard dirt with the damn fist-sized rock in your hand, your ass and thighs in pain, and slowly, slowly, you take this rock and squish it against your face, right between your eyes, right on the bridge of your nose as if a big X marked the spot. And you pushed harder and harder with each burning sensation you felt, until a bit of rock bits somehow found their way onto your eyelids.</p><p>Then you, still slumped over the table, you felt the light poke of a cold finger on your forehead, and it all came out. Cue younger me saying, “Why does everyone hate me?” Pleading, “Why? What did I do?”</p><p>The director, she took her hand and patted what she called my sheeplike hair. “Little Milly,” she asked, “what happened?” She kept calling me “little Milly” even though I was the opposite at that point. I was the great big lying Warrior Dougenis boy, Milan.</p><p>To the candle, I repeated, “What did I do? What did I do?” Sucking in air through my teeth, I demanded, “Why did they look at me like that?”</p><p>“Who?” she asked.</p><p>“The elders,” I replied, my eyes tearing up. “They hurt me…”</p><p>She kept brushing my hair and she asked, “They hurt you?”</p><p>The candle fire zipped up and down, laughing at me. “N-No,” I stuttered, “no, I can’t be hurt.” I furrowed my brow and squeezed my hands together below me, begging to feel the heat of a lost dream. “I can’t be hurt. I’m a Warrior,” I said. “Only monsters and sharp things can hurt me… Eyes are not supposed to hurt me…”</p><p>Think, “I am a Hastan boy, I am a Hastan boy…”</p><p>To clarify, this was before Angelo and the Empress and I sent our dreams into the cosmos. This was years before. I just never said anything because I didn’t want to. I thought I could ruin the truth, could redo the truth, but I couldn’t. An impossible dream I held onto in the depths of my rotten heart.</p><p>Outside, Amica’s soft voice radiated throughout the village. Other voices started to join in for the festival singing, exemplifying her voice in harmony. The slow drumbeat accompanied the marching of the procession.</p><p>The director, she hummed along with the tune. Instead of beating a drum, she stroked my hair. But me, my whimpering fit no beat at all.</p><p>“Breathe, little Milly,” she told me, “breathe.”</p><p>So I did.</p><p>The candle to my left, its flame flowed with the soft breeze, then stood upright. If the wind were any more hectic, if the candle were like the flaming stick from my first story with the embers chipping off, the table would’ve been set on fire.</p><p>One small misstep and my heart would’ve been set on fire too.</p><p>But I didn’t give a shit.</p><p>My rotten heart.</p><p>Outside, the twangy sounds of some string instrument replaced the singing, reverberating from the village center. Right after that, the plucking of another instrument echoed. These were the type of instruments my late Warrior parents would’ve played. In actuality, I think the Chief was playing one of them, while Angelo’s father was playing the other.</p><p>And me, my younger self, trying to imagine my parents in place of those two but failing, I finally asked, “Ma’am?” I finally asked, “Ma’am, who am I?”</p><p>The director kept stroking my hair.</p><p>I swallowed the lump in my throat and lowered my voice. “Ma’am,” I repeated, “who is Milan?”</p><p>“Milly—”</p><p>“Who is Dougenis?” I cried. “Who is Andrew? I don’t know those people!”</p><p>“Milly,” she urged, “please, breathe—”</p><p>The candle remained steadfast as I spat, “I’m from Hasta, right? My parents are Hastan?”</p><p>“Yes, Milly—”</p><p>“Then why don’t I look like Angelo?” I hissed. My fingers pressed together so hard my bones ached. I couldn’t feel the dream.</p><p>Whispering, the director replied, “Of course, not everyone from Hasta looks the same.”</p><p>I dug my nails into my hands. “No!” I yelled. “Angelo doesn’t fish! He doesn’t trade!” My voice cracked as I continued, “He’s not big at all. But he’s from Hasta!?”</p><p>Outside, the twangy instruments merged with Amica’s singing. And the director stopped stroking my hair.</p><p>The director, she stuttered, “I-I am not sure how to explain this. But I want you to look at me, Milly.”</p><p>So I did.</p><p>“You see me, Milly?” she asked, her arms folded over the table like two dead fish.</p><p>“Yes, ma’am,” I replied.</p><p>She sighed, tilted her head down at me with her glasses glinting orange. “I’m Hastan,” she told me.</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>The director, she told me that she was a Hastan girl who was raised by Hastan parents and that she was the one who taught me how to fish. I liked it so much that it became part of my identity. It became my innate nature, my innate ability. I was a Hastan boy because all I knew about Hastans was that all of them were great at fishing.</p><p>On my left, the candle swayed. And the director urged, “Milly.” She urged, “Look at me.”</p><p>So I did.</p><p>From my right, she pulled between us her bottled merchant ship. Its red-and-white striped sails and its many tiny ropes swayed when she moved it. The boat itself didn’t move, though, since it was fastened to the bottom of the bottle with fake sticky green water. Below it, the copper plaque on the wooden stand read, “To my lovely Zeva, from Zi-zi.”</p><p>The director dragged her finger across the top of the glass. “My husband made this for me,” she said. “He’s in charge of the orphanage in the Hasta Dragonblood Village. He made this in our younger years, when his crew got stuck in Lanza Channel’s stormy waters.”</p><p>The candle fire flickered against the glass bottle, and outside, the drums beat louder and louder. The bottle, it lit up in orange amongst the dark blue everywhere else.</p><p>“Milly,” the director asked, “do you know how he made this bottled ship?”</p><p>I stared at the ship for a long time. In a light ghost on its surface, the bottle reflected the scales on my chest and my round face. My ice-cold blue eyes and my sheeplike hair. And the harsh red scratches on my nose from the rock.</p><p>The director said, “I don’t know how he made it myself, to be honest.” She forced a smile.</p><p>Me, staring at my eyes in the reflection, I knew what ice looked like because that was one of the rumors that went around. That ice killed my father. That ice should kill me. “The coldness is in him,” people said behind my back. “You can see it right there in his <i>eyes.</i>”</p><p>Think, “I am a Hastan boy, I am a Hastan boy…”</p><p>Then I shook my head and said, “No.”</p><p>“No?”</p><p>“No,” I repeated, “I don’t know. But my parents would’ve taught me if they were still alive.”</p><p>And the candle stood still, upright like a knight frozen in ice.</p><p>The director and I, we stayed silent for a long moment while the rest of the village kept celebrating. The twangy instruments, the strings, the drums, Amica’s voice—they all joined in harmony while we contributed nothing.</p><p>I waited for the director to tell me to look at her, but that cue never came.</p><p>Then, finally, she said, “Milly.” She said, “Milly, your parents wouldn’t know how to make this either.”</p><p>Don’t think, “I am a Hastan boy, I am a Hastan boy…” Don’t think something you’ve already lost. Don’t think something you never even had.</p><p>Looking down at my whitened knuckles, balled into a fist, I asked the director, “Who are my parents?” But she didn’t even have to tell me.</p><p>Neither were from Hasta. Neither have ever been to Hasta.</p><p>The orphanage director, the candle reflecting orange off her fish-silver hair, she told me my father was from the Northern Federation of Pagnas and my mother was from the Magical Kingdom of Litus. Looking out the window, at the black silhouettes surrounding the fire-lit village center, she told me, “Your father’s name was Andrew, and your mother’s name was Aeni.” She moved the bottled ship back to the side and said, “Your family name was Dougenis.”</p><p>I said, “Oh.”</p><p>Try to think, “I am a Pagnas boy, I am a Litus boy…”</p><p>You heard what the director said, and the first thing you did right after was you looked at your hands. Your big, soft, but scratched hands. The hands of an ironworker or a miner, perhaps. The hands of a tomb raider or a magician.</p><p>There was no more room in the mismatched world in your head, though. You knew this. You fucking knew this. But you kept denying. You kept repeating the words as if that would make them real. You kept repeating them because not doing so would’ve crumbled your world right under your feet.</p><p>You said, “So my name is Milan Dougenis?”</p><p>And she said, “Andrew was an orphan, like you.” Her sinewy, work-hardened hand perched on the table, she said, “He grew up in the old orphanage. My parents were managing it at the time, after they moved here.”</p><p>Your eyes darted back and forth from the frozen candle to her hand to your hands as you listened.</p><p>She said, “I was raised by my relatives in Hasta until I was fifteen. That’s when I moved here to help my parents with the orphanage.” Behind her shining glasses, she closed her eyes. “Andrew was ten,” she continued. “He was born in the Pagnas Dragonblood Village before he ended up here.” Then she lowered her voice and said, “We never knew how his parents passed away.”</p><p>Outside, the red sky dimmed to purple, and Amica’s voice sang as loud as ever.</p><p>My father, Andrew Dougenis, he had weak bones. “He barely played rough with the other boys,” the director told me, “but he wanted to be strong. So he trained on his own.” She told me that my father did his Warrior rites at eleven years old too. “You and Andrew are probably the youngest Warriors to date,” she said. “You both were so proud of your scales.”</p><p>In your mouth, you rolled around the name “Andrew Dougenis” like a melting snowflake over your burnt tongue. You didn’t know that, though. You didn’t want to. Because to you it meant sickness was coming. Sickness was coming to get you.</p><p>“To be honest,” the director said, “your father never looked strong. But his heart was powerful.” Looking out the window, at the purple sky and away from me, the director said, “He never had a rotten thought. He did not have a rotten heart.” She chuckled. “One time, he wanted to prove his strength by delivering an important message from the last Oracle to the Litus Dragonblood Village all by himself,” she told me. “He was only thirteen. People thought he was going to die.” Then she lowered her voice and said, “I had the misfortune of overhearing people saying they wanted him to.”</p><p>The Litus Dragonblood Village, the fallen Litus Dragonblood Village, that’s where my father met my mother. “Aeni was an orphan too,” the director told me. “It’s a pity on her. Her village practically collapsed when the whole kingdom fell.”</p><p>On your burnt tongue, you rolled around the name, “Aeni.” Just “Aeni” because she didn’t know her parents either.</p><p>On the desk, you put your head down, the fat of your cheek pressed against the surface once again, as you stared at the candle.</p><p>The director continued, “She wanted to go home with Andrew because she did not want to wait for the Medius Divine Family to take over.” My mother, Aeni, she saw the blue Warrior paint on my father’s body and wanted to join the league. “Andrew always talked about how Aeni saved him from dehydration and hunger.” She laughed. “Whatever softness Aeni lacked, Andrew made up for it,” the director mused. “And whatever strength Andrew lacked, Aeni made up for it. She had nothing to lose.”</p><p>Think, “I have nothing to lose, I have nothing to lose…”</p><p>You saw the candle staring at you and you stared right back. The candle, steadfast and still, you hoped for the wind to be stronger. You wanted the embers to be real. You wanted something to burn because the fire was no longer in you. It was out there.</p><p>So once Amica’s singing, the procession’s singing, and all the twangy and ricocheting sounds of the village simmered down, it was at this moment you asked the director, “Ma’am?” Like what the Witch asked you on the boat ride to Pagnas many, many years later, you asked the deadly question: “Ma’am, how did my parents die?”</p><p>The types of stories I hate are the ones that tell the truth upfront, no buildup, no nothing. But give it to me. Give it to me. Give me the truth again so I never let it go.</p><p>The director gave me no cue, but I turned my head straight to look up at her. The candle, it looked at both of us, at her pursed lips and my watery eyes, both of us basking in orange. Slowly, slowly, she told me, “Milly.” She told me, “Your parents were promoted to be the Warriors of the Oracle.” Then she took in a deep breath and said, “They failed.”</p><p>I said, “Oh.”</p><p>Her voice softening, the director told me, “We didn’t have an Oracle for thirteen years after the previous one got killed by Divine Knights.”</p><p>I said, “Oh.”</p><p>On your burnt tongue, you tried to burn the phrase, “They failed.” All it did was echo in your mouth, down your throat and into the rest of your whole self. They failed. They failed. The phrase, it went into your head and impacted the shaky ground of your fake, mismatched world right under your feet. They failed.</p><p>The director, she stuttered, “T-This is what Andrew told me of what happened.” Her wrinkly hand shook and she stuttered, “T-There were so many rumors… The truth and the lies both felt so wrong.”</p><p>I placed my hand on hers and felt it warm.</p><p>“Your mother and father,” she told me, “were awake for many sleepless nights to guard the front of the Oracle’s secret establishment.” She sniffed and continued, “The Oracle was asleep—that was the word Andrew used—and she was channeling her powers for a special mission from Atruum.” The director’s voice started cracking. Lowering her voice, she told me, “No one knew the exact location of the Oracle’s establishment. It could’ve been the forest, the mountains, the waterfalls—no one had a clue, not even the Warriors of the Oracle. There were many pairs of Warriors set to guard different locations to confuse any trespassers, especially the Divine Knights.” She sighed. “Your mother and father did not know theirs had the Oracle.”</p><p>Looking down at her desk, the director furrowed her wrinkled brow. “It is horrible how it happened,” she said. “No one expected the Oracle to be in hiding for so, so long.” She said, “They were up for days, for weeks, guarding their location. And then”—her voice shuddered—“the one night the Divine Knights arrived, your parents fell asleep.</p><p>“Thank Atruum your parents survived,” the director told me. “But the Oracle…” She turned to the window as I held her hand. “I suspect the Knights were trying to capture her,” she told me, “but they killed her instead.” She said, “They tried to kill everyone they found, but they didn’t find your parents.”</p><p>My parents’ grand title as the Warriors of the Oracle—it became a badge of ridicule. My parents’ gravestones near Atruum’s sacred Den—those were an insult.</p><p>“Milly,” the director said, “look at me.”</p><p>I was already doing that.</p><p>The director said, “During the thirteen years before you were born, your mother suffered many miscarriages. She and your father were removed from their higher positions because of their growing… bad luck.” She paused as the words sizzled in her mouth. Then she said, “I’m sorry.”</p><p>“It’s okay,” I told her.</p><p>Younger me, please, just give me the truth.</p><p>The director said, “When your parents had you, Aeni died of blood loss.” In her wrinkly hand, she gripped mine. “Without your mother to defend her husband,” she told me, shaking, “the other Warriors and elders ousted Andrew, and they told him he was no longer welcome in the village until he could prove himself.”</p><p>In the dimming, cold night, a strong breeze blew in through the window, and it shook the candle fire into a glowing whip lashing out at me.</p><p>Younger me, just give me the fucking truth right now.</p><p>“So he decided to return to his homeland and join the Pagnas Knights,” the director said. “But before he left, he gave his baby over to the new orphanage, over to me.” She gripped tighter to my tense hand and said, “Then he told me that, if he were to die out there, out in Pagnas… then I must change his baby’s name.”</p><p>Younger me, what was the baby’s name?</p><p>Gripping her one hand with your two, you asked the director, “Ma’am?” The second deadly question, you, wide-eyed and stupid, you asked her, “Ma’am, what was the baby’s name?”</p><p>Younger me, just tell me the baby’s fucking name.</p><p>Then the director, the old ma’am, at first she opened her mouth, and nothing came out. But then, she said, “Zakir.” She said, “His name was Zakir Dougenis.”</p><p>Younger me, you were Zakir Dougenis!</p><p>Outside, under the purple night sky darkening blue, the fires on the torches of the procession spun around and around, and the drums matched the beat of the marching and cheering. Like the torches, the candle fire on the desk, it lashed out in a long streak as the one flame close enough to reach you.</p><p>Do you see it?</p><p>Andrew, Aeni, Zakir. Angelo, Alouette, Zachariah-Zola. A through Z. The beginning and the end.</p><p>You were the end.</p><p>Burn your rotten heart.</p><p>The aborted baby. The end.</p><p>You, biting down on your lip so hard, through your teeth, you whispered to yourself the name “Zakir Dougenis.” A foreign name, but it’s yours. Zakir Dougenis.</p><p>You don’t know that person.</p><p>Your name, Milan, that was the name the old ma’am gave you because your father did not want you to carry the burden of a failure. But look at how that ended up.</p><p>The director told me, “Their willpower.” She choked, “It was so strong.”</p><p>You, you desired for your brothers and sisters to come back to life. Your twelve dead, miscarried brothers and sisters. Now you’re the thirteenth.</p><p>Your name, Milan, the old ma’am and fate picked it because it was the thirteenth letter. It was square in the middle of the alphabet. You hid from being the end by being the middle.</p><p>Burn your rotten heart.</p><p>Slowly, slowly, the director told me, “That’s why I was so shocked when we received news that Andrew died from… a sickness.” She pressed hard on that “s” sound as if she were trying to bite back her tongue.</p><p>Here’s the part I know already.</p><p>The old ma’am, she told me, “The villagers called that sickness ‘karma.’”</p><p>In your mouth, you rolled around that killer word like a broken frost-stopper bone, the spice crashing down your throat and choking you. And then, finally, you asked the third deadly question. Stupid, stupid, younger me, you asked, “Ma’am, why did my father have a disease called karma?” The word binding around your rotten heart, your heart craving for the lost dream, you asked, “Am I going to get it too?”</p><p>And then, she started crying. It was the soft kind of cry where she’s hiding her face from someone she shouldn't have talked to.</p><p>“Ma’am,” you called, your face growing hot, “ma’am, what is karma? How did karma look like?”</p><p>Tears trailing down her wrinkled face, she said, “It’s like frostbite.” She said, “It’s like heavy, heavy frostbite…”</p><p>From this point forward, me, I know the rest.</p><p>You and I, we did not need to ask her about how your father, my father, looked like before he died.</p><p>The connection, it’s complete.</p><p>Burn your rotten heart.</p><p>Your skin and tissue turn pale and cold before decaying into black and cracking off. Your fingers turn black and crack off. Your toes turn black and crack off.</p><p>Your life turns black and cracks off.</p><p>Burn your rotten heart.</p><p>Burn your rotten heart.</p><p>Burn your fucking rotten heart.</p><p>After she said this, after the director told me all about karma, about frostbite, you, me, you still didn’t know how exactly your father died. That part’s still fantasy. It will always, always be fantasy. It’s what’s left of the crumbled, mismatched world in your head.</p><p>Fuck if you know he did himself in by throwing himself into the avalanche.</p><p>And right when you heard the happy yelling of the kids outside, running back in because the festival just ended for the night, you, me, your hot head, you jerked up and slammed your big, soft, scratched hands against the candle holder. And where the wick landed, one small misstep and the table started to burn.</p><p>I am not a Hastan boy. My parents are not Hastan parents.</p><p>My parents are dead and so am I.</p>
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<a name="section0017"><h2>17. Chapter 17</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>My dead body awakens in a deep blue fog, chained with its arms pulled behind a horizontal pole onto a steel pillar rising high into the ceiling. The chains, twenty or thirty of them, they wrap around the giant blue dragon in my dead body’s chest, through its maw and around its spikes, around both of its arms and its neck, around its waist and its legs. Then the shackles trail all the way to the hard stone brick walls of this little square room, housing this little square cage with my dead body hoisted up the middle.</p><p>My dead body, it’s being exhibited like that, like an abandoned boat’s mast, sinking again into a standing-upright old mattress in a crappy Pagnas lodging in the middle of the night. The cold air and the cold chains paralyze my dead body. Handcuffs hang from the ceiling all around. The ground feels rough under my dead feet. And there’s a bright white light shining through the iron bars of the dungeon window behind all of this, casting my shadow over the cobblestone floor as if it were the last gravestone placed very, very late amongst the corroded stone pillars around me.</p><p>When my dead body tries to speak, the dumbass it is, another chain twists around its mouth and holds its head down flat.</p><p>I can’t move. I can’t talk. I can’t run. But that’s how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it.</p><p>My soul, my body, my rotten heart, they’re all trapped here in whatever plane of existence this is.</p><p>Although I can barely speak, the leftover spice from the split frost-stopper bone chokes up the back of my throat, so I cough it up with my teeth still clenching the chains. My brow creases up with the spice still sticking, and the X that’s supposed to be on my face suddenly burns up and leaves behind a bloodied mess that drips down my face, over my cheeks and my lips and down the blue dragon in my chest. Light drops echo throughout the chamber, and I stare down at the blood around my feet as my eyes flutter shut.</p><p>In the beginning, everything’s dead. And then, a gruff voice calls out, “Don’t go to sleep, big champ, or you’ll be sleeping forever.”</p><p>With a harsh pull, the chains around my neck and mouth jerk me backward, and the spice flares up back in my throat. My eyes open wide and my blood leaks over them as a gangly man in a giant black coat, wearing leather gloves too big for his dead hands, approaches me in slow steps from an old wooden door. The thumps of metal boots bounce off the walls in this cramped dungeon cell.</p><p>The guy stops right under me, but far enough so the blood doesn’t touch him. Through his dark slits of eyes, I see the ice-blue coldness that up till now I’ve seen only in a reflection.</p><p>“You go to sleep, you go to hell,” the guy says.</p><p>“Go to hell,” I tell him through my teeth.</p><p>“Well, jokes on you,” he replies, “but we’re already there.”</p><p>Steam rises from the fresh and old blood on my face. My sealed blood, shed from the massacre, mixes with my dead blood from the Empress’s blows. I try to shake my head since my neck’s getting stiff, but a large bump on the left side of my forehead starts throbbing.</p><p>That bump, it’s not gonna go away from now on.</p><p>Out of his coat pocket, the guy fishes out a frost-stopper bone and pops it into his mouth. He pulls his head up, opens up wide, and tongues the bone down, then he swallows loudly. “It helps the throat,” he tells me. Then he takes a deep breath. Says, “I didn’t listen to myself this time, though.”</p><p>He taps a metal boot on the floor, looks to his sides at the corroded pillars, away from me, while I’m bleeding. With a hard gloved hand, he brushes his spiky white hair back and pulls his collar down to show his goatee and his sad, sad smile. Then he looks at me. “You wanna know who I am, don’t you?” he asks.</p><p>When I nod, the bump in my head stings, and my teeth gnash on the chains.</p><p>“Well,” he says, “I’m dead.” He scoffs. He says, “This is how I died,” and pulls down his collar and pulls up his sleeves, revealing ice shards sticking out of his reddened, raw skin, turning coal-black where the needles poke through. He says, “I died a few months ago. Or something like that. I’ve been here for kind of a while.” He takes off his gloves and all ten of his fingers are black and have cracks on them. When I look closer, actually, both of his whole damn hands have cracks on them. Looking at me through his dark slits of eyes, he lowers his voice. “You knew how I died already,” he tells me.</p><p>“Karma,” I say under my breath.</p><p>“If that’s what you wanna call it, sure,” he says. “Now, about who I <i>was…</i>”</p><p>And he stops talking. Starts waiting. A heavy cloud of hot breath puffs out of my nose and stays suspended in the air for a few moments. Slowly, slowly, through the chains in my mouth, I say, “You’re my father.”</p><p>The guy under me, he pauses. Then he says, “Yeah.” He says, “I’m your daddy.”</p><p>My dead father puts his gloves back on, then flicks a finger so the chains around my mouth slide away. The blood from the X on my face drips onto my lips and mixes with my spit. To my dead father, I tell him, “I want to kill you.” I tell him, “You fucking abandoned me.”</p><p>His eyes don’t meet mine.</p><p>“Look at me,” I hiss. “You made me. And you left me like <i>this</i>. Zakir Dougenis, Milan Dougenis, whatever the fuck this godsdamn monster is.” I tell him, “You abandoned me. You and my mother—”</p><p>“Don’t slander your mother like that!” he snaps. “She didn’t abandon you. It was just her time to go.” From the corner of my eye, my dead father, his lip shakes as he says, “Don’t blame her, son. She deserves to be in the better place.” He begs, “Don’t blame her.”</p><p>My father walks closer to the pillar I’m shackled to and puts a gloved hand on a group of chains circling me. He asks, “If I let you go, will you beat me?”</p><p>And I say, “I don’t know.”</p><p>“Good,” he says. “I like a boy who’s honest.”</p><p>A cold, cold silence fills the room. Me, I bite down on my lip. With the burning on my face fading away, I say, “I’m dead because I lied, father.” I say, “Hiding the truth is the same as telling a lie.” I say, “Father, I’m not honest.”</p><p>He doesn’t look at me. “I wasn’t honest myself,” he says, and grabs the group of chains, snapping them away.</p><p>With the chains retreated from me now, I fall to the ground, on my ass, and the giant blue dragon in my chest flattens out over my body as I sit with my knees bent and my two rough hands over my gory face. Like I’m twelve again. I say, “I even asked you if you <i>knew</i> my father. In Angelo’s fucking house.” I say, “Why did you lie to me? Like what I said was just fucking nonsense!? ‘Am I <i>supposed</i> to know someone like that,’ you fucking said. Gods!”</p><p>My dead father sits across from me, cross-legged on the ground. “I didn’t want to be your father because I knew I wasn’t good for you,” he says. “Son, I wanted to die. And I did it. I know how that feels. But—hey, I’m ready now. I want to help you. Come on. Redeem me, Milo.”</p><p>I shift my hands to look at him. “You don’t have the right to call me that,” I say.</p><p>“Then redeem me, Milan,” he says. “Please.”</p><p>With him sitting this close, the truth is, I’m bigger and stronger than my own father ever was.</p><p>“You’re just pulling my fucking leg,” I reply. “You’re just a fraud. You’re not my father. You’re just Atruum trying to get to me. Leeching off my memories for the closest ‘father’ I could ever have.” I cough up the spice in my throat and tell him, “Why don’t you just make it easier and let me die too?”</p><p>My dead father rests an elbow on his thigh and his head on his hand. “If that’s how you want to think,” he says, “go ahead. But my request’s still the same, boy.”</p><p>I put my bloody hands to my sides. “Prove to me that you’re my father,” I say.</p><p>He opens his coat and pulls down the collar of his wool tunic. Right there, on his chest, is a patch of blue scales.</p><p>The scales on my chest coming from my father. My round face, coming from my mother.</p><p>“Where’s my mother?” I ask.</p><p>“Where’s my son?” he asks.</p><p>“What? Look at me,” I say. “I’m right here.” It’s hard to feel, but I press around the chest part of my flattened Dragon Scar to find my own patch of scales.</p><p>“Is that how you wanna answer?” he huffs. “Sure. Okay then.”</p><p>I bite my burnt tongue.</p><p>My dead father, he tells me my mother’s already past this point. “We’re in one of the eight Asura Gates together. Been here before, right, boy?” he says. He drags a finger across the air. “When you die, you gotta pass through all eight of these babies before you can move on for good. But if you take too long…” He takes his gloves off, outstretches his blackened hands in front of him, and says, ”You end up a demon.”</p><p>The black cracks on his skin aren’t frostbite. It hasn’t been too long since we met here, but already, the skin on his hands have turned dark grey and purple, smooth and killer. An Asura Goblin’s skin.</p><p>“So,” I say, “you’re telling me I’m dead.”</p><p>“I just brought you here.”</p><p>“Are you an asshole?”</p><p>“Let me help you, Mills.”</p><p>My dead father tries to reach out to me, but stops halfway through and ends up slamming a bare hand into the pool of my blood. It splatters red up his pale and splintered arm. “If you keep up so much hate, Mills,” he says, “you’ll lose yourself even faster.”</p><p>Imagine the amount of hate Angelo has for me right now to turn him into that beast.</p><p>To my father, I scream, “Then let me out of here so I can pass the gates!”</p><p>He gets up and I get up, and I make a run for the door, driving myself through with my fist first and kicking up dust under my feet. But right when I’m about to jam my fist into my father's dead face, he flicks a finger and all the chains yank me back, flat against the pillar.</p><p>“You don’t pass the gates by running, boy!” he snaps.</p><p>I ask, “So am I dead?”</p><p>He says, “Are you my son?”</p><p>And I scream, “Gods, man! I AM YOUR GODSDAMN SON!”</p><p>The sound, it bounces off the walls, off the stones in the floor, rattling the dust off the corroded pillars and the old handcuffs, filling the gap between my father and me.</p><p>He blinks.</p><p>Once again the chains release me, but this time they pull me onto my feet before slinking away.</p><p>Me, sweating, I lean against the steel pillar, put my arms against the horizontal pole to support me up. I don’t look at him.</p><p>The hardest thing to look at on a dead body is the face. At his, at Angelo’s, and at mine. Looking at the dead face of a soul.</p><p>“The old ma’am at the orphanage didn’t tell me you were this rotten,” I sneer.</p><p>“Son, please,” he begs, “don’t go to sleep. Don’t go to sleep. You need to tell me.”</p><p>“He was already dead, father.”</p><p>“Tell me more, Mills.”</p><p>“I don’t want to look at him, father.”</p><p>“You have to.”</p><p>“Dammit!” I slam my fist against the horizontal pole. “Even my own father loves him more. Living with him instead of taking back his son!”</p><p>My father, straining his voice, he jabs, “No one ever loved you more than he did!” He says, “He talked about you all the time. He wanted to be you, boy, and he still does.”</p><p>“That’s not love, father,” I tell him. “That’s idolization. I know what that is!” I choke up the spice in my throat and say, “That’s the only way I can pretend to love someone. That’s the only damn way I know!”</p><p>My dead father walks up to me with his hands behind his back, the way I used to handle the blue group. “Son,” he asks, “why do you hate for people to love you?”</p><p>“Because I’m bad and I know I’m bad,” I say. “I have so much blood on my hands, father. I’m willing to carry this burden. I’m willing to be the scapegoat. Let me keep this!”</p><p>He paces up to me and sticks his face very close so the steam of my blood touches him. “Every person has a bit of bad in them,” he says. “Every person has a bit of good in them. You need love for that, big champ. People want to give it to you. <i>I</i> want to give it to you.”</p><p>I gulp down hard and stare square into his ice-cold eyes. “Maybe I don’t want your love anymore,” I say. “Maybe I don’t want any kind of love anymore.”</p><p>He gets up so close, yet his dead body radiates no warmth. He stares back into my own ice-cold eyes, his lips tight, his eyelids narrowed in the sad anger of a regretful spirit, whispering his last words of regret to the avalanche about to kill him. Then, to me, he whispers, “At least give it to yourself, son.” He whispers, “Or you’re not a person anymore.”</p><p>The bump in my head stings. My head spins. My dead father, he pulls back and turns his back to me.</p><p>And then the blue room melts away.</p>
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